#pnin

[crucifiedlovers]

...the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

[outstanding-quotes]

Some people— and I am one of them— hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2023: PNIN by Vladimir Nabokov.

[mr-saavik]

Comforting to know that parking on college campuses in America has sucked since at least the mid 20th century

Proof from: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, published 1957 and A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, published 1964

[myhikari21things]

Read of Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1953) (191pgs)

[eggtrolls]

Broke: Donald Trump’s tweets came from whatever weird idiolect bullshit he thinks in the moment, including the iconic line ‘Sad!’

Bespoke: Donald Trump’s historically significant Sad! tweet is an allusion to Nabokov’s 1953 novel Pnin and the beautiful, noble, sonorous line that you remembered all your life from Kroneberg’s text

[wildatheart2003]

Reading list right now-

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

The Machiavellians by James Burnham

The Ordeal of Civility by John Murray Cuddihy

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Màrquez

[rueroyale]

On the eve of the day on which Victor had planned to arrive, Pnin entered a sport shop in Waindell's Main Street and asked for a football. The request was unseasonable but he was offered one.

'No, no', said Pnin, 'I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!'

- Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

[ifyouseekay468]

That one tiktok audio of three different songs but with Nabokov narrators.

Humbert as "I am in misery" Kinbote as "I give dick CPR" and Pnin as "Reeses puffs"

[bighiddenheart]

I may only be on chapter 2 but Pnin is making me begin to understand what a blorbo is

[foxingpeculiar]

A footnote from the article I’m reading on Nabokov’s Pnin (1957).

[crucifiedlovers]

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

[outstanding-quotes]

Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

[mademoiselle-red]

“To consider the possible sources of Pnin in Nabokov's experiences at Cornell is to be reminded that the book was a very early example of the "campus novel", a subgenre which is very familiar to us now, but was only just beginning to manifest itself in the early 50s. Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952) has some claim to be the first in the field, and Nabokov would certainly have been familiar with it, since he knew both McCarthy and her husband, Edmund Wilson, who was one of his closest literary friends at this time (they fell out later). Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution (1954) which was, for those in the know, a riposte to McCarthy's book, gave a further impetus to the new genre, though Nabokov had already embarked upon the Pnin stories when it appeared.

What the three books have in common is a pastoral campus setting, a "small world" removed from the hustle and bustle of modern urban life, in which social and political behaviour can be amusingly observed in the interaction of characters whose high intellectual pretensions are often let down by their very human frailties. The campus novel was from its beginnings, and in the hands of later exponents like Alison Lurie and Mal colm Bradbury, an essentially comic subgenre, in which serious moral issues are treated in a "light and bright and sparkling" manner (to borrow the phrase applied to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, who would certainly have a written a campus novel or two if she had lived in our era).”

[mrvaidya]

Now a secret must be imparted: Professor Pnin was in the wrong train. "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov

[myhikari21things]

Read of Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1953) (191pgs)