Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, 1953

Nabokov’s tale of a Russian émigré professor in a small college where he is the object of humor and dismissal is a tale of the expat’s struggle for finding a place of stable settlement among the loss and alienation of exile and defamiliarization in his new home.  Nabokov at his most clever with puns, jokes, alliteration, and verbal somersaults.