He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the window. “It’s better not to sleep at all,” he decided. There was a cold damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another, incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday—Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere—at the windows, the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself—were flowers. The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled

The Blog

  • Best New Novelists image of tag icon

      For the second time (first in 1996), Granta has named the Best of Young American Novelists (all of them under 35). Some choices are predictable (Jonathan Safran Foer and Gary Shteyngart), but there are a number I haven’t read but now want to. There’s been buzz in the blogosphere about Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City […]

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  • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominees image of tag icon

    The Los Angeles Times announced the finalists for its annual Book Prize last night. Where? In New York, of course. Los Angeles always seems to be deferring to the great agent/publishing nucleus on the other side of the country (a very practical move, I know, but also a shame). Below are the nominees for Fiction […]

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  • PEN/Faulkner Award image of tag icon

    Philip Roth has nabbed the PEN/Faulkner award for “Everyman”. It’s the third time he’s won (previously for “Operation Shylock” and “The Human Stain”). But I found the shortlist intriguing – All four of the runners-up were short story collections: Charles D’Ambrosio ”The Dead Fish Museum” Deborah Eisenberg ”Twilight of the Superheroes” Amy Hempel ”The Collected […]

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  • The Dead Fish Museum image of tag icon

    In an era marked by the short story’s loss of cultural heft, Charles D’Abrosio’s collection of stories makes that loss seem tragic. The name of this short story collection by Charles D’Abrosio is taken from the title story, in which an immigrant wife can’t pronounce the word refrigerator, so she calls it the dead fish […]

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  • LA Times Slide image of tag icon

    The LA Times, one of the three remaining newspapers publishing a special book review pullout section, is planning on downsizing the space in half. One half of the pullout will be devoted to opinion, the other half to books. Now it’s not as though the LA Times book review section was exceptionally good before, (they […]

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  • Wendell Berry image of tag icon

    Wendell Berry has a new short story in the March edition of Harpers Magazine. It’s called “The Requirement”, and it’s not available online yet. Although usually I tend to like Berry’s essays more than his fiction, I’m beginning to appreciate (some) of his fiction more. This one hit me particularly well, probably because I can […]

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  • (Im)Plausible Denial image of tag icon

    As Edward Champion and the Literary Saloon have already noted, Sam Tanenhaus makes a buffoon out of himself in an interview in Queens College Knightly News. In response to the question of whether he reads lit blogs, Tanenhaus says: “No, I don’t. I don’t really have time. Other people here do and they’ll tell me […]

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  • Roundup Miss Snark image of tag icon

    Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and winner of the Man Booker Prize, has been writing political nonfiction for the last ten years, but now is working on a new novel. (hat tip to Laila Lalami) Now that all the discussion on Wizard of the Crow is over, check out the three […]

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  • Seeing is Blindness: Jose Saramago image of tag icon

    The longtime readers of this blog know that I like the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, and I especially like his novel Blindness. In the book, an epidemic of blindness sweeps the nation, and a band of travelers have to survive under quarantine. However, the sequel, Seeing, published in English in 2006, garnered rather unfavorable reviews, […]

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