James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
pretty sad ones, as well as having some some comedy in them.
Finally, in chapter six, he's found a place that he really likes uh to live in.
It's a lovely house that he's still renting, though he may buy it, and he decides to have a housewarming party, what what he in Peninian style calls a house heating party.
It's a great triumph, but at the end of this chapter he
He is told by his boss that his job is in jeopardy because um the department intends to hire a successful Anglo Russian writer who sounds a lot like Vladimir Nibokov, um, to come and be in charge of the department and Pnin
says that he that he won't work under this person, that he that he knows him um he knows him of of old, and he doesn't want to work under him.
And chapter seven
A shorter chapter r is is Penin's wonderful escape both from the novel and the campus.
We actually see him driving out uh of the campus as uh one of the faculty members, Jack Cockerel in the English department, is doing his um celebrated impersonation of poor Penin.
I know it's a novel that's dear to your heart, uh and you've also written brilliantly about Nabokov.
One way we might just get into it is to remind ourselves of Nobok.
Nobokov's arrival uh on America's shores.
He has to leave Russia, of course, in nineteen seventeen.
He goes to Cambridge, where, rather wonderfully, he does French and Russian, i.e., he did nothing.
I mean, French and Russian.
That was a slog for Nabokov at Cambridge.
He has
an entire first career, as I just mentioned, in uh largely in Berlin, writing in Russian, and establishes himself as as a as a leading emigre writer, and then has to tear all that up effectively and flee in nineteen forty with his wife Vera
for New York.
And I think I'm right in saying that on that i it's was a m very moving detail to me, on that boat over, um, he starts writing because he knows he's gonna have to earn a living, he starts writing in English several of the lectures that he will end up giving at places like Wellesley and Cornell and
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