Pnin (1957)

Pnin’s difficulties with rooms, timetables and colleagues make belonging to a university feel provisional. His scholarship and generosity sit beside an institution that can treat him as a comic inconvenience. Nabokov’s shifting narrative perspective asks who has the power to make another person look ridiculous. Choose it for a tender, unsettling portrait of an émigré teacher whose professional home may never be entirely his to keep.