Reading

I was very excited to finally read this book all the way through. During my senior year of high school, in AP Lit, I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and loved it. Still, it remains one of my favorite novels. Wanting more of Dostoevsky, I bought Notes from Underground in the summer of 2021. Upon starting the book, however, I quickly realized that this was very different than Crime and Punishment. I was confused and disoriented, and I never made it past the “Underground” section of the book. I deemed Notes too difficult and set it aside.

This spring, after reading 1984 (the inaugural book of my new reading journey), I gave Notes another attempt. Again, I had the same reaction to it as I did before, and I didn’t make it any further. Despite these failed attempts at reading it, I didn’t dismiss Notes. Instead, appreciating Dostoevsky’s powerful writing ability, told myself that I wasn’t ready yet. “I’ll read it later in life.” But after reading several more books, I had adopted a more literary mindset. I wanted to give it another shot. But before I started reading again, I made sure to do some research on the context and purpose of this work. This proved to be incredibly helpful. So now, my review.

Notes from Underground’s first section, “Underground,” is a 40-page diatribe written haphazardly by the main character and narrator, the Underground Man. This section is meant to be dense, self-contradictory, and disorienting so as to introduce the reader to the mind of this Underground Man. Ultimately, he vehemently argues against rationalism and romanticism and instead argues that men do not always act in their own interests. Rather, a conscious man’s paramount goal is to exert his own free will, no matter how. Thus, someone may subject himself to great suffering simply for the sake of proving his freedom. The Underground Man’s argument is flawed, but this is intentional. I found this very interesting. Dostoevsky has the Underground Man break traditional form, repeat himself, address the readers directly, and do other peculiar things, which in turn creates the image of a highly eccentric and neurotic man. A sick and twisted man.

Next, the “Apropos of the Wet Snow” section. Here, the Underground Man tells the readers of his past experiences. This section reads more like a novel and has a simpler form. I was fascinated by how truly neurotic the Underground Man is. He is filled with self-doubt and loathing, and he projects this onto everyone he encounters. Dostoevsky does a phenomenal job of revealing the mind of this man, not through telling us, but through the Underground Man’s own telling of his stories. Such a creative and powerful method. There were points in this section where I was literally laughing out loud at how absurd the Man was. The crippling fear and hate that so filled him were beyond the point of cringing or pity. I simply laughed.

The end of the book is great, and we’re not strictly told what message to take away. In a strange way, the Underground Man is both a satirical caricature of the “enlightened man” who can reason his way through all of life and someone who exemplifies many strange but real qualities of everyday people. He is a case both for and against existentialism. Overall, a great book. Thought-provoking, unique, and entertaining. Would recommend, and I will be reading more Dostoevsky down the road.

This was my first time reading Tolstoy, and I was very pleased. I was enthralled by the setting of this book; the Caucasus mountains, the Terek river, the forests and dunes, the Cossack village, the Chechens and Nogai, the Cossacks, and the village women all fascinated me. This was such a unique setting, and it makes me want to travel to that region.

I related a lot to Olenin, a young man with great opportunities ahead of him who seeks true happiness. He goes to the Caucasus to get away from the stuffiness of Moscow and start a new life in the mountains. This new place quickly becomes his home, yet he is still an outsider. He adopts a mindset of complete conviction and restraint: he will find his true happiness through serving others. He gives his horse to Lukashka for no apparent reason, and he resists his urge to pursue a relationship with Maryanka, viewing her as a noble and beautiful statue and nothing more.

This worldview changes, however, when he meets Beletsky, a fellow Moscow aristocrat. His true aim now is to serve his own happiness above all else. His entire world then revolves around Maryanka. Rather than hunting, exploring, or passing time with Uncle Eroshka, he spends hours watching Maryanka through his window, visiting her parents, and planning his next interaction with her. He feels the deepest sense of love in his heart for her.

By the end of the book, we see that Maryanka could never have truly loved Olenin. He was an outsider and always would be. He couldn’t relate to her. She is a Cossack, he is not. Olenin’s new self-serving worldview fails him. He is now wounded, and so is Maryanka.

In the last chapter of the book, Uncle Eroshka tells a story to Olenin about his bullet wound. While it healed, the bullet still remains. This is Olenin’s love story. But, in his telling of the story, Eroshka is distracted and dismissive. He’s a babbling old man. This represents his relationships with the Cossacks: he can befriend them and even become close with them, he can adopt their way of life, but he will never truly be one of them. It is a game, just like the half-hearted telling of Uncle Eroshka’s story.

What did I learn from The Cossacks? Really, it didn’t give me an answer, but it rather asked me questions. What is happiness? And how does one attain it? Are we to serve others, even at the expense of ourselves? If life is so short, why don’t we simply drink and shoot and chase after women? How does a man know that he is in love? What is it to be in love? Tolstoy gives no resolution, only the ache of the bullet still lodged in the flesh.

Gosh, this was a boring book. I now know that I don’t like McCarthy’s style at all. His language is stripped-down, understated, minimalist. He describes nothing. No internal dialogue. No views into the hearts of the characters, minus Chigurh and Ed Tom a little bit. The dialogue, without any quotations, is very hard to follow. The plot is sometimes unclear at points because it is so understated. There is no drama (which is maybe the point). I only finished this book so quickly because I wanted to get onto the next thing and not have my money go to waste. I loved the movie, loved it. But this was pretty bad.

Redeeming qualities: cool story, western vibes, Texas setting, manly, gunfights.

There was one consistent stream of interior monologue: Ed Tom’s reflections at the beginning of the chapters. SOOO boring. Jeez. I skipped most of the last three because I couldn’t get through them.

Emotionally distant, stylistically flat, thematically inaccessible, and ultimately a chore to read. Ultra-minimalist, emotionally vacant characters, nihilistic, fatalistic. A drag. I now know that I enjoy books with emotional depth, philosophical/moral weight, rich dialogue, sense of meaning/transformation/triumph. I’m not drawn to flat/sparse prose, detached or unreadable characters, nihilism or moral ambiguity for its own sake, and fiction that mimics reality so closely it forgets to be interesting.

Very interesting commentary and conclusions, but a very slow read. The first portion of the book informs the reader of the historical context: interesting. Then, we read about Battalion 101’s mass murders, first in Jozefow and then elsewhere. These accounts, at first, were very interesting to read. Indeed very heavy, but cool to see into the minds of these men. Then, the book took a very boring turn. Catalogs and catalogs, numbers and dates, and page-long German names. It got very boring, and I began to skim.

Finally, in the “Ordinary Men” chapter, Browning departs from this stale retelling of historical events and provides his own commentary. This is the meat and potatoes of the book. Through illuminating and compelling arguments, he makes the case that myriad factors contribute to the creation of these mass murderers, namely, conformity, deference to authority, indoctrination, etc. Very cool stuff and very applicable to today: anyone can be susceptible to these things, we must shield our minds and moralities from them.

Then, Browning defended his work and dissented with one of his most vocal critics, Goldhagen. This was brutally dry, but had interesting points.

Overall, this book was pretty dry but had very important and profoundly interesting conclusions.

This was pretty good. When reading, I quickly picked up on the characters of this allegory: Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin, and so on. It was entertaining to see how the animals on their farm panned out. Around halfway through the book, I thought that, while Orwell’s idea for this book was creative, he had already exhausted it: I got the gist. It wasn’t until the last portion of the book that it gained my deep appreciation. In the end, we see both the pigs and the farmers lord their corrupt power over their farms. Both the communist elites (the pigs) and the human farmers (capitalists) selfishly grasp at power at the expense of others. Animal Farm is not a childish stab at communism; it is a powerful story that displays the evils of corrupt hierarchies everywhere.

After reading East of Eden, I wanted to read something very short. This was my first stab at Hemingway, whom I was very excited to read. I had previously heard about the masculine stoicism of Hemingway’s characters, especially in this book. I was looking forward to seeing if he lived up to the hype.

Unfortunately, I soon discovered that I do not like Hemingway’s linguistic style. The stripped-down, barren sentences devoid of punctuation left me bored and sometimes confused. His style made the book seem to drag on at a snail’s pace.

However, I loved the thematic content of this book. The old Cuban setting, the grit and stoicism of the Old Man, his struggle against the seemingly indomitable marlin. His grace under pressure and desire to press on. The ending was great: after his grueling journey which led to triumph and then ultimately brutal defeat, he calmly sets aside any self-doubt and plans for his next fishing outing. A true man.