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
Judith Freeman on Raymond Chandler 
High, high praise for Judith Freeman’s new biography of Raymond Chandler – “The Long Embrace” – in the new LA Times Book Review: Frank MacShane published the standard Chandler biography more than 30 years ago, and until now, no other book has made us view this great American writer afresh. “The Long Embrace” does. The […]
Read More Writers Strike Back! So the vote for the Writers Guild of America to go on strike was 90% in favor, God bless ’em. The strike will happen on Monday – picket lines in both Los Angeles and New York. I must say that I didn’t think the executives would let it go so far – I pictured an […]
Read More Benjamin Percy: Refreshing I once heard a senior editor at a publishing house say that book reviews, even in major newspapers and magazines, have a negligible impact on a book’s sales (and went on to cite figures that showed hardly a hump in sales numbers, much less a spike, in the week after the review). That’s myopic and […]
Read More Banned Books Even though I’m a couple weeks late on banned books week, I’ve been reading, apropos of nothing, a number of banned books. I just finished Nabokov’s Lolita and am reading Joyce’s Ulysses – both wonderful, wonderful books (although so far my favorite is Lolita – Nabokov is a genius). I also have a longstanding fascination […]
Read More And I Thought He Was Dead Which may not be far from the mark, figuratively or literally. As noted by Michael Orthofer at The Literary Saloon, Alain Robbe-Grillet just released a new novel, Un Roman Sentimental, but I would vouch that it’s anything but sentimental. In fact, Orthofer calls it “(young teen) porn”, but knowing Robbe-Grillet’s penchant for lasciviousness in his […]
Read More Roundup: Say What? Dumbledore was gay. Who knew? And what terrible timing and awful mechanism to reveal it: after the series, and without a shred of evidence actually inside the books. There’s a battle brewing between Raymond Carver’s widow, who wants to publish the bulkier original texts of her late husband’s short stories, and Knopf, who believes the […]
Read More Gina Nahai – Caspain Rain V.S. Naipaul, in Among the Believers, takes a whistlestop tour through the Middle East, writing about the tension between the dynamic societies of the West, embracing new and revolutionary technology, and the static Islamic societies, holding onto tradition. That basic tension is present in Gina Nahai’s new novel, Caspain Rain, only in sociological form. The […]
Read More Man Booker Winner So as I predicted, Ian McEwan didn’t win the Man Booker; instead, they choose an author with considerably less fame: Anne Enright won for The Gathering, one of the books considered to be an outside chance. Check out the post-win BBC interview.
Read More Man Booker The Booker award is announced tomorrow, and all I can say is that it better not be On Chesil Beach. The book does not show Ian McEwan at his best, and the only thing that could catapult him into the winner’s spot is an over-reliance upon his authorial publishing record and reputation, rather than an […]
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