"i suspect it really is a florescent corpse, and we are inside it" ( )

I was really surprised at how I did not get on with this book, after loving Pale Fire so much (admittedly 10 years ago). Pale Fire in many ways has similar themes of small college life and an oblivious, naive Russian academic dreaming of his homeland, so it's hard for me to pin down exactly why I didn't get on with this. I think I'd sum it up as

1) Nabokov comes across as absolutely bitter about everyone and everything - academia in general, the Russian émigré community, women, people like Pnin, American life, every character in the book - the only thing that's spared is the occasional hazy nostalgia for old Russia
2) A lot of the book describes tedious things - many characters, due to 1), can't do anything interesting and end up just being obnoxious. Tedious dinner parties, the most minor academic scuffles, lectures on deliberately tedious subjects (see 1) that also cut off before they can be interesting. The Russian emigres are all wealthy enough that they have no issue, Pnin himself has had an 8 year lectureship despite teaching nobody and academically creating nothing, the academics are all awful teachers and awful scholars (see 1) and there's no sign of the world underpinning it at all. Nobody actually poor enters the scene. Everyone is connected.
3) 1 and 2 combine to create a depiction that can't be sympathetic, can't feel vaguely realistic, and rarely attempts humour. Pnin feels like someone you should sympathise with - and positive reviews insist you should - but he feels constantly undermined by the writing. And ok, maybe I just feel very weird reading this kind of academic novel where someone can draw a reasonable salary for teaching one class to 3 people very very badly for 9 years - from the perspective of today's hypercompetitive academic world it feels like a pisstake to act like he's particularly hard done by.

Only after reading and looking at the blurb did I even consider the issue of the narrator being a liar or making things seem worse about Pnin. He only really takes centre stage in the last chapter and there's a few little bits about bad blood between them. It makes sense... but then it's still an unpleasant and unfunny book to read, it just has the excuse that that's the intended role of the narrator. I don't think it improves my opinion of the book overall. ( )

Just reread. Loved every bit until they ran into the duke and the king. Then it felt like a bit of a caper. Loved the river and rafting descriptions again though. First half is 4.5 stars maybe. ( )

What's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”

Read this book in my Junior year English class. I enjoyed it but the teacher preferred when we read it as a class, and had to write an essay on it. ( )