Anatomy of a Dress

I love telling people about Pnin, trying each time to better encapsulate Nabokov’s strange little nugget of a book, a puzzle like one of those compact spheres that pulls out wide between the hands. So yes, the short answer is: campus novel about the archetype of the absent-minded professor. Also notable is the fact that Pnin was written as respite during that final relentless stretch of Lolita. I think about Clare Quilty’s death scene that stretched on and on and came to a messy, embarassing end and think: yeah, I might have turned to something a little lighter. 

Timofey Pnin is totally Humbert Humbert’s comic foil. He is a bumbling, doddering, awkward dude, but he’s honorable and hopeful and grateful and he’s basically one of my favorite characters from literature. Hands down the end. Because I am still young and don’t have the breadth of vision to spot and dismiss unseen forces (in life OR in literature, natch) the final chapter unraveled with extreme rapidity and kind of randomly. I reread it and thought for awhile, and then I realized all in one great dawning — less like a lightbulb and more like a force of nature — and the book expanded and became a kind of powerhouse and I decided this summer I am going to read Nabokov’s complete works. 

Starting with a re-read of Pale Fire. But not before I read The Cloud Sketcher by David Mitchell, because I am almost always guided, in my reading, by intuition, and this is the next book I picked up. 

Incidentally, I finally had time to upload photos from the past several months to my Flickr account — starting from scarred plums on the tree in Peter’s front yard, through my move to Dallas, making Hungarian Mushroom Soup and Mama Cass’ new sweater this winter, our brief foray to San Francisco and the re-opening of Dallas’ oldest and gayest girlbar Sue Ellen’s. Enjoy.