Word: pnin
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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...
...that later, published in Paris in 1955, became a must item of the contraband spice trade in which Henry Miller's Tropics have bulked large. Now. after several years of subterranean fame, Lolita has finally found a U.S. publisher. Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift-which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night...
...PNIN, by Vladimir Nabokov. About an émigré Russian professor at a U.S. college whose joyously ridiculous English and congenital helplessness only faintly conceal the sorrow of exile...
...Nabokov is in the strange position of a man whose career is leading a double life, for the most remarkable demonstration of his fictional powers is a novel virtually unknown in the U.S. or abroad. As dark and demoniac as Pnin is gentle and sunlit, this novel has in the past year become a sotto voce scandal on two continents. Lolita, published in English by France's Olympia Press, gives the pornography-v.-art debate its most combustible tinder since Judge Woolsey handed down his famed decision on Ulysses...