We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(8) Snow Line
You'd think that a novel about a guy with bad English would be easier to read. Think again. What with going back and forth in time, the occasional lapses into Russian, and the verbose writing, sometimes it's hard to make heads or tails of things. And did we mention the vocabulary? Even we had to dig out the dictionary when words like "desuetude" (1.5.1) popped up. Don't worry, it's a word that's fallen into desuetude.
Besides just the language, to really understand this novel you have to have a decent understanding of the Russian Revolution and the émigré community. Of course, it's possible to read Pnin without this knowledge and still get the general gist and a lot of the humor of this story about a silly old man. But just like the people around Pnin, then you'd miss the deeper and darker implications of his life story.