They're always looking for that proverbial nut.

Pnin is hilarious. Nabakov's verbal wit and inventiveness are enough reason to keep reading. This is one of those "I had no idea what I was missing" moments for me, not having read the man previously. Every page I want to stop and adopt a quote for a web tagline somewhere.

Squirrely Liza? Or squirrel, squirrel? The little guy on p. 58 reminds me so of dear Liza.
Quote:
...all the time politely pressing the contraption down while trying not to meet the unpleasant eye fixed upon him. Its thirst quenched, the squirrel departed without the least sign of gratitude.

Familiar behavior?

Too true.

There are multiple squirrels. That one's my favorite too.

Wonderful Timofey is the ultimate soft touch!
Gotta love 'im.

"Impossible," said Pnin. "So small Island, moreover with palm, cannot exist in such big sea."

"Well, it exists here."

"Impossible isolation," said Pnin.

"Yes but -- really, you are not playing fair, Timofey. You know perfectly well you agree with Lore that the world of the mind is based on a compromise with logic."

"I have reservations," said Pnin. "First of all, logic herself--"

"All right, I'm afraid we are wandering away from our little joke. Now, you look at this picture. So this is the mariner, and this is the pussy, and this is a rather wistfull mermaid hanging around, and now look at the puffs right above the sailor and the pussy."

"Atomic bomb explosion," said Pnin sadly.

"No, not at all. It is something much funnier...." [! I love that line]

"Doesn't she want to come back?" asked Joan softly.

Pnin, his head on his arm, started to beat the table with his loosely clenched fist.

"I have nofing," wailed Pnin between loud damp sniffs. "I have nofing left, nofing!"

What chatty Madame Shpoylanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin—not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind…but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget—because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart.

"Yes," said Pnin with a sigh, intriguw is horrible, horrible. But on the oher side hard work will always prove its advantage. You and I will give next year some splendid courses which I have planned long ago. On Tyranny. On the Boot. On Nicholas the First. on all the precursor to modern atrocity. Hagen, when we speak of injustice, we forget the Armenian massacres, tortures which Tibet invented, colonists in Africa.... The history of man is the history of pain!"

--but the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.

appreciate Pnin at his unique Pninian worth, and this despite the fact that he was more of a poltergeist than a lodger. He did somthing fatal to his new heater and gloomily said never mind, it would soon be spring now.