{"id":73505,"date":"2024-10-02T13:55:16","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T17:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=73505"},"modified":"2024-10-02T16:06:54","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T20:06:54","slug":"october-reading-group-pnin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2024\/10\/02\/october-reading-group-pnin\/","title":{"rendered":"October Reading Group: Pnin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Book Beat reading group selection for October is Pnin<\/em><\/a> by Vladimir Nabokov. We will meet virtually online via Zoom on Wednesday, October 30 at 7:00 p.m.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. <\/p>\n

The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation, and discussions are free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 or email bookbeatorders@gmail.com for more information.<\/p>\n

Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin<\/em> features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Serialized in The New Yorker<\/em> and published in book form in 1957, Pnin<\/em> brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.<\/p>\n

Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.<\/p>\n

Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.<\/p>\n

\n

“Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”\u2014John Updike<\/p>\n

“Lolita<\/em> is the book for which Nabokov will always be best known, but it was Pnin<\/em> which first established his reputation as a writer of distinction and originality in the medium of English, and as an American rather than an \u00e9migr\u00e9 author, representing the manners and speech and landscape of his adopted country as vividly as the Russia from which he was exiled.”\u2014David Lodge, from the introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Pnin<\/em><\/p>\n

“Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.”\u2014Chicago Tribune<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career.<\/p>\n

In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Book Beat reading group selection for October is Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. We will meet virtually online via Zoom on Wednesday, October 30 at 7:00 p.m. The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending.  The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73508,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-reading-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}