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By Elaine Wilson | Friday,
March 20, 2015 - Off the Shelf
“There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of
brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy
perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless
person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are
installed in the dark.”
So Nabokov introduces Liza, the ex-wife and persistent object of
Professor Timofey Pnin’s affection, with the poetic prose that permeates all
of his writing. But Nabokov’s novel Pnin
is set apart from the rest; his usual serious lyricism is tempered with an
uncharacteristic quantity of humor in the story of a Russian literature
professor at a liberal arts college in the northeastern United States.
Professor Pnin is a bumbling, good-natured, awkward intellectual
whose speech matches his personality: his stilted, grammatically incorrect
English, peppered with distinctly academic vocabulary, is always spoken in
earnest and frequently with hilarious consequences. Pnin is underwhelmed by
his students, oblivious to the depth of departmental politics and his
colleagues’ disdain, tragically still in love with his ex-wife, and leads a
remarkably plain yet eccentric life. In Pnin,
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