Word: pnin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cobb College is a rich New Hampshire institution, well stocked with preposterous pedants, campus lagos, academic racketeers and addled eggheads. As such, it is the latest member of the poison ivy league founded by Mary McCarthy (Groves of Academe), Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin) and Randall Jarrell (Pictures from an Institution). It may or may not be patterned on Wesleyan University's Institute of Advanced Studies, where Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson spent some time with her husband Sir Charles Snow as visiting British fellows...
...Kisses. All of this is vaguely endearing and even consoling-a little like watching a giant computer hash up some simple arithmetic. Dr. Freud is as lovable as Professor Pnin when he pores hopelessly over a train schedule or asks a stranger the way to a coffee shop while standing in front of a coffee shop. Nowhere is Freud more touchingly fallible than in his love letters to his fiancee Martha Bernays, which occupy half this book...