Title: Will the real Pnin please stand up?
Review: Professor Diment's book moves from biography to literary intrigue quickly and delightfully. The intrigue itself, of course, has been out in the open for quite a while---that Pnin, the stodgy and stumbling professor, was inspired by one of Vladimir Nabokov's colleagues at Cornell, Marc Szeftel.There's plenty of material on that in the book, but the real treat are the stories on university politics, the strange and shimmering links between art and the "real", the compassionate sketches of very odd characters (including Szeftel himself, as well as Nabokov's first biographer, a Kinbote-like figure), and some seriously funny endnotes. _Pnin_ ends triumphantly, and so does Diment's _Pniniad_, with the reader discovering the life-story of a man who would otherwise be an interesting side-note---what the reader gets is a sort of roman a clef written on the margins of fiction.
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