In one of the most charming moments of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), our hero is about to be visited by a 14-year-old American boy, son of Pnin’s former (and dreadful) wife and her fraudulent lover, Dr. Eric Wind. Pnin wonders what gifts of welcome he can give young Victor, and decides that along with a football, he will provide some pleasurable reading. Since Pnin believes everyone in his native Russia knows Jack London’s work, Pnin asks a bookstore employee for London’s autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909), to which the lady responds “Eden, Eden, Eden .  .  . let me see, you don’t mean a book on the British statesman? Or do you?”  

JACK OAKIE, LORETTA YOUNG, CLARK GABLE IN ‘THE CALL OF THE WILD’ (1935)

20TH CENTURY PICTURES / EVERETT COLLECTION

When the confusion is cleared up, the only book of London’s to be found is an old edition of The Son of the Wolf (1900), a collection of stories and London’s first published book. Pnin decides to buy it, though it is inferior to Martin Eden: “Not his best book but O.K. O.K, I will take it.” It turns out that Victor doesn’t like sports and believes the London volume is a translation from Russian, Pnin’s mother tongue. Politely, Victor says he’s sure he will like the book and reveals, “Last summer I read Crime and”—at which point he yawns and doesn’t complete the title of a novel by a writer whom Nabokov, if not Pnin, abhors.