- Pnin is driving, though not with any particular gift for understanding road signs, to a place called Onkwedo. Turns out this is where his friend Al Cook has a huge country house.
- Every other summer, cook and his wife invite Russian émigrés to come and spend a few months at their home. And this year is the first time that Pnin has been invited. We're kind of excited for him, because it seems like he should actually feel at home for once.
- Apparently many of the Russians have brought their kids with them, but these Russian-American children have no interest in hanging out with a bunch of old people. They've rather sit in their rooms and listen to the radio. Shocker, we know.
- Anyway, Pnin makes his way to this oasis of Russian émigrés. He drives a car at 10 miles an hour and still somehow manages to veer dangerously off the road. But when he gets to the Pines, you can tell he is among friends because instead of making fun of him, they praise his driving ability. Sounds like he's right at home.
- Pnin's friend, Bolotov, tells him that he has been reading and rereading Anna Karenina over and over again. But this is the first time that he notices there's something weird going on with the time of the novel. This starts Pnin on a very exacting and long tangent about the precise nature of time at various points in the novel. You know, just in case you were starting to think he was normal.
- The narrator then starts to tell us about Cook's Castle. As far as we can tell, it seems like some kind of huge mishmash of a mansion. All kinds of caustic, French, Florentine, and other influences are present in its design.
- Somewhere along the line, Pnin wanders off to talk to his friend, Konstantin Chateau. They catch up on their past, Russian history, and teaching in America.
- On the way, they meet up with another of Russian ex-pat. This guy, Ivan Ilyich Gramineev, is a painter who has forgotten his hat. Our hero is gracious enough to make him one out of the kerchief.
- This is when we finally figure out what happened to Victor. Apparently he was supposed to come to the Pines too, but Liza suddenly up and decided to take him to California for the summer. We guess Pnin doesn't get to be too happy all at once.
- Now it's time for some swimming. After a long buildup, in which Pnin removes his clothes, his cross, and his wristwatch, he takes the shortest dip into a lake that you have ever heard of. Awesome.
- Dinnertime. Chilled beet soup (a Russian fave). After dinnertime. Croquet, the only time in the entire novel that we actually see Pnin not look like a bumbling idiot. We don't know about you, but we're definitely cheering him on. Go Pnin, go!
- But, because no good deed can go unpunished, he has a heart attack right afterwards.
- The heart attack, mixed with some memories brought up by Madame Shpolyanski, causes Pnin to hallucinate. He imagines that his father and Mira, his former love, are actually at the Pines with him. In his mind, he goes back in time to when he was a young 18-year-old boy and the Nazis in a concentration camp had not killed Mira. That's pretty heavy stuff.
- Normally, Pnin doesn't think about Mira. It's too hard. But something about his heart attack bringing him close to death allows him to cope with the pain of remembering her.
- This is probably the saddest thing that happens in the whole book.
- And just as we are feeling sad for Pnin, he decides to get over it. Time for tea and the next chapter.