Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov [FIRST U.S. PAPERBACK PRINTING / 1957]

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov  FIRST U.S. PAPERBACK PRINTING [1957] AVON BOOKS Vintage paperback in excellent condition.  Cover shows some very light creasing / shelf wear.  Tanning to pages.  Beautiful copy! One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950's. 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.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 evoke