Martin Schneider writes:
Last week we posted the syllabus of Zadie Smith’s fiction seminar at Columbia University. I noticed that one of the books was Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. It triggered a memory: last October, on a New Yorker Festival panel with Hari Kunzru and Peter Carey, Gary Shteyngart answered moderator Peter Canby’s request to name a favorite or most influential work by intimating that he reads Pnin “once a month.”
I know the journalistic credo has it that once is an occurrence, twice a coincidence, thrice a trend. I have only the two mentions, yet nevertheless cry “Trend!” My impression is that Pnin is relatively obscure; it doesn’t come up in conversation much, at least not with the people I know. I’ve read four Nabokov novels, and Pnin isn’t one of them. As far as I know, Pnin is noteworthy for being somewhat more autobiographical than most of Nabokov’s work, as it is about a Russian emigre who is working in the United States as a professor.
So much for this focus group of one. Have you been running into Pnin lately?
As it happens, Pnin has a slight familial resonance for me; my father used to tell how impressed he was with the original Pnin stories when they appeared in The New Yorker in the mid-1950s, so it feels like I’ve been aware of it for years. I’m now traveling and have a limited number of books at my disposal, but, triggered by Shteyngart perhaps, elected to bring that one with me. I’ll get to it soon.