Word: pnin
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...Postwar British and American Fiction,” the first half of a lecture is invariably devoted to Wood reading aloud his favorite excerpts from the book under discussion. “Flip to page twenty-nine where Nabokov writes, ‘The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag.’” Wood grins, before eagerly pushing forward, “Ah, yes, yes! There’s a great bit four pages earlier when Pnin gets dentures and Nabokov describes his tongue as ‘a fat sleek seal...
...Pnin,” Nabokov once wrote that “the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets.” He would have been delighted by the chance findings of an Oregon State grad student this week, who in the process of experimenting with manganese oxide in a 2,000-degree furnace accidentally created a never-before-seen pigment of blue. Reportedly “shocked” at first...
...novel “Pnin,” Vladimir Nabokov—no stranger to “lexical commingling”—persistently described the title character in a series of epithets (“polite Pnin,” “brave Pnin” etc). Alexander’s narrator has a similar obsession for self-characterization. “Subnormal,” “heteromorphic,” “perpetual like Assyrian cups,” “not like Odysseus” or Vasco da Gama...
...Vladimir Nabokov told the Paris Review in 1967—and he was telling the truth. It isn’t difficult to imagine any one of his memorable protagonists as helpless prisoners, each chained to his oar on Nabokov’s ship—Pnin to indifference (against which he cracks), Kimbote to delusion (to which he succumbs), Humbert to lust (which drives him to kidnap and murder). The more forward motion these characters seemed to make, the clearer it became to the reader that they were stuck in the same place. But while Nabokov?...
...life: with energy, flair and an unfailing relish for the ironies of the situation. Somewhere in one of those classes, as Nabokov might have guessed, was at least one future novelist, Thomas Pynchon. Somewhere in his own imagination glimmered at least two future academic portraits, the title character of Pnin and the poet John Shade of Pale Fire...