Baroque, Too Smart for Its Own Good, Sort-of English
What would a Nabokov novel be without some literary pyrotechnics?
At times while reading Pnin we almost feel like Nabokov is just playing games with his writing ability. That's what we mean by too smart for its own good. Take a look at this passage: "When Joan with a bagful of provisions, two magazines, and three parcels, came home at a quarter past five, she found in the porch mailbox a special-delivery air-mail letter from her daughter" (2.7.1).
Did you catch it? Nabokov is counting. He wanted to see if he could make a reasonable sentence where he just counted to five. Who does that?
Then there are the completely unnecessarily baroque (a.k.a. super-duper detailed) descriptions. The narrator says: "Technically speaking, the narrator's art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes" (2.1.6).
That's basically a whole paragraph to say that the narrator isn't very good at explaining telephone conversations. Did we need to talk about minarets to get that?
While the first two seem more or less just aspects of Nabokov entertaining himself with his literary skills, the last part of Pnin's writing style seems to serve a thematic purpose. There are times in the narrative where the writing almost reads as if it's not English.
For example: "Pnin and Clements, in last-minute discourse, stood on either side of the living-room doorway, like two well-fed caryatides, and drew in their abdomens to let the silent Thayer pass" (6.11.3). Um, okay. Normally someone would just say Pnin and Clements sucked in their bellies to let Thayer pass. Or even if you wanted to keep the animal motif, you could say that their stomachs were stuffed as pigs. But Nabokov does neither.
He compares them both to bugs and uses highly scientific terms instead of vernacular to describe them. The effect of this makes us feel kind of unsettled. It doesn't exactly read like English, because no one speaks this way. (If you know anyone who does, send 'em our way). By doing this, Nabokov kind of mirrors Pnin's issue with speaking and understanding English. So for a few brief moments, we are put in his shoes.