Over at The Editor’s Desk, Andy Bechtel has pointed out an entry in Paper Cuts, a blog on books at The New York Times, inviting readers to contribute a specimen passage from a beloved book. Naturally, the response has been enthusiastic, and it is getting a little crowded over there. So I offer you a short selection from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin.

The novel recounts the adventures and misadventures of Timofey Pnin, a Russian expatriate with a precarious position at Waindell College, a provincial institution that offers Nabokov many opportunities to mock American academic life. The novel is funny and satirical and deeply humane, a nearly perfect comic novel. I reread it with pleasure every few years; and if you do not know it, I grieve for your loss.

Professor Michael Koppisch read this passage to me with great relish 35 years ago at Michigan State, and acquaintance with this book is but one of many debts of gratitude I owe him.

From Pnin:

Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French. This did not prevent him from traveling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions, at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humor any attempt to inveigle him into the subtleties of the parley-voo. A highly esteemed money-getter, he had recently induced a rich old man, whom three great universities had courted in vain, to promote with a fantastic endowment a riot of research conducted by graduates under the direction of Dr. Slavski, a Canadian, toward the erection on a hill near Waindell, of a “French Village,” two streets and a square, to be copied from those of the ancient little burg of Vandel in the Dordogne. Despite the grandiose element always present in his administrative illuminations, Blorenge was personally a man of ascetic tastes. He had happened to go to school with Sam Poore, Waindell’s President, and for many years, regularly, even after the latter had lost his sight, the two would go fishing together on a bleak, wind-raked lake, at the end of a gravel lane lined with fireweed, seventy miles north of Waindell, in the kind of dreary brush country—scrub oak and nursery pine—that, in terms of nature, is the counterpart of a slum. His wife, a sweet woman of simple antecedents, referred to him at her club as “Professor Blorenge.” He gave a course entitled “Great Frenchmen,” which he had had his secretary copy out from a set of The Hastings Historical and Philosophical Magazine for 1882-94, discovered by him in an attic and not represented in the College Library.