PS to wiki’s: "According to Boyd, Pnin is Nabokov's response to Don Quixote which he had read a year earlier. Nabokov lambasted Cervantes for his cruelty to Quixote, seeming to encourage the reader to be amused by the eponymous character's pain and humiliation. The title of the book, Boyd claims, lends even more credence to this theory, as it sounds like and nearly spells "pain.” (Boyd, AY, 1991,p.271-72). To my non-native English speaking eyes (and ears) the wiki redaction cited above is disconcertingly ambiguous since it seems to suggest that, for B. Boyd, it was Nabokov’s intention “to encourage the reader to be amused by…,” when it’s exactly the opposite that he observes (“ But if the opening of Pnin appears to ask us to hoot at the novel’s hero,  Nabokov suddenly turns the story about [  ] He has a complex inner existence Don Quixote is never allowed, and his pain suddenly matters. Mistake-prone Pnin comes to sum up all human mishaps and misfortunes, the strange blend of comedy and tragedy in all human life.”). This kind of false shock has never happened with me while reading Pnin: my confusions were always Pnin’s confusions and I always thought that they’d been deliberately planted in the novel by the author

Jansy Mello: A query about the narrator in Pnin … was he not Pnin’s fellow countryman and coeval? If so, why isn’t he as afflicted as Pnin was when expressing his thoughts in English and dominating the pace of the novel with the same agility as those other “foreigners,” like HH and Kinbote?  Pnin was more familiar with the French, while living in Europe, than with the English, right?  (I’ve forgotten too much…)

Recently, I sent a quiz to the VN-L where readers were invited to recognize Nabokov’s lines in Lolita, among others that were written by Ed Sheran in “Thinking out loud”*.  I tried to make my choices and made one shameful mistake on item 7 (“don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is”). It occurred to me later on  that these lines are one of the few that were not written by HH - since they report Lolita’s words to him. “My” Lolita is exclusively HH’s - I mean, V. Nabokov’s.

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* https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;bab69023.1512