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
Seeing is Blindness: Jose Saramago 
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, […]
Read More Eclectica Steve Erickson has a new website, and I have to say it matches his eccentric writing (The main page picture changes with each load, but I like the swastika one). Also, the Cal Arts faculty page (the school that publishes the literary journal Black Clock, which Erickson edits) says Erickson’s new novel Zeroville is coming […]
Read More Short Story Month: Writing a Story Okay, so in defiance to that whole Write-A-Novel-In-A-Month thing with the acronym that nobody can ever remember, I’m signing up for the mission proposed by Syntax of Things: A short story in a month. And I’m not jumping on this bandwagon because back in Novel-Writing-Month-NaNoWrMoTg-WrSlKillmyself I actually thought I could write a chunk of a […]
Read More Roundup Lit Blog Co-Op I know I’m a bit late with some of these, but they’ve been hovering on my mind while I’ve been trying to get this new site up and running. Check them out: J. Robert Lennon has a new blog called Ward Six, which he writes with his wife. Check out his post on Five Chapters […]
Read More Things You Should Not Admit So Malcolm Jones, the book critic of Newsweek, candidly admitted that he hadn’t finished Vikram Chandra’s 928 page novel Sacred Games. If he were simply reading for pleasure, this wouldn’t be a problem, but he happened to have the temerity to write a review about a book he hadn’t finished. No, no, no. This is […]
Read More Duttons Down It’s abstractly depressing when you hear the statistics of independent bookstores closing in droves; it’s concretely depressing to see favorite bookstores in your town get the axe. First Dutton’s of Beverly Hills was forced to shut down; now the news is that the original Dutton’s will be remodeled out of existence. The LA Times reports […]
Read More William T. Vollmann and the Principles of Review I did not appreciate William T. Vollmann’s review of Anthony Swofford’s Exit A in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. It’s not that I believe he was wrong about the strengths of Swofford’s first book, Jarhead, or even that he was wrong about the weaknesses of Swofford’s first novel Exit A. It’s because I […]
Read More Return of the Fox I’m back from my Belizean honeymoon all fired up for 2007. Whoopee! That’s what scuba diving in the carribean and cave tubing will do for you. Now I promised a report on the reading going on down there in Central America, and I always make good on my promises, so here: I reread Richard Ford’s […]
Read More Mrs. BookFox Tomorrow I will double my teampower by marrying a wonderful woman who shall be dubbed Mrs. BookFox (at least online). So please enjoy some of the other book blogs in the blogosphere as I take a honeymoon until January 8th. Best wishes from Belize, where doubtless I will have at least some time on the […]
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