Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov

In my student days (many years ago now) I regarded Nabokov as the greatest of all authors on the basis of Pale Fire, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Lolita. This one left me a little cold, but I’m not sure whether my tastes have shifted or this is less brilliant.

It is brilliant in some ways. Take the name of Pnin; almost palindromic, almost anagrammatical, comic yet believable and amenable to derivations such as “Pninian”. There are some good jokes, but I often felt that too much was beyond me in terms of plot and symbolism. Maybe I was just smarter when I was 20.