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
Pynchon: Against the Day 
If you haven’t yet been seduced by Pynchon mania (or even if you have been unaware of the blogosphere intensity), you should go to the The Elegant Variation and check out all the links and commentary on old Pynchon, New Pynchon and all of the infinite conections. There. I’ve thrown you into the pit. Enjoy […]
Read More NYTBR Podcast Highlights w/ Sam Tanenhaus Sam Tanenhaus on the efficacy of the New York Times Book Review: “Welcome to our podcast, with the caveat that this sick crew long ago abandoned the illusion that we have any insight to offer or even have a clue what we’re talking about.” The distorted-guitar quasi-punk theme song opening that tries so hard to […]
Read More National Book Award 2006 So Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Echo Maker. In a field without the literary power-sluggers of the year (like The Road by Cormac cheapest pharmacy in california McCarthy and Everyman by Philip Roth), Powers was the early favorite (and Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions was the oddball). […]
Read More Salman Rushdie’s Defense of Fiction in Haroun When you become doubtful of the impact of stories upon culture, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories will cheer you up. Not because it is so clearly a book that has had an impact on the world (no, The Satanic Verses will fill that role), but because it’s a book that discusses, through […]
Read More Unbearable Lightness of Being out in Czech! I thought our patience was tried by having to wait two years for the translation of The Curtain, but it took the Czechs twenty-two years of waiting to get the Unbearable Lightness of Being translated. (Via The Elegant Variation) Labels: Milan Kundera
Read More Will Self: The Book of Dave So the latest hyper-idiosyncratic vision of Will Self is out in the form of The Book of Dave. Summary: Deranged cabbie pens manuscript, buries the metal tablets in the backyard, and five hundred years later, after the apocalyptic flood, the tablets are unearthed and become the template for a new religion (sounds Mormonistic, but in […]
Read More Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners I’m very taken by Kelly Link’s new collection of short stories, Magic (for beginners), not the least because the title implies the genre: she writes otherworldly, magical stories, lying somewhere between Amiee Bender and Haruki Murakami. To read a story from the collection, check out The Faery Handbag (which won the 2005 Hugo and Locus […]
Read More The Curtain: Milan Kundera Publisher’s Weekly couldn’t give a more enthusiastic thumbs up for Kundera’s last book in a trilogy on the poetics of the novel: “It’s not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood.” For early takes, check out this early […]
Read More Richard Dawkins The God Delusion So Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is #4 on Amazon.com right now and #8 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His shill is simple: Belief in God is irrational and religion has caused irreparable damage to society. Unfortunately, his ideas are a bit too simple. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay in the November issue […]
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