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

  • Roundup of Essays image of tag icon

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a lovely essay at The Washington Post that’s supposedly about the desks she learned to write upon, but it’s really more about the love of the house where she grew up. Thought the whole fatwa on Salman Rushdie had slipped into the dustbin of history? Not quite. Rushdie was knighted and […]

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  • Divisadero: Michael Ondaatje image of tag icon

    Michael Ondaatje’s latest book Divisadero, as the name implies, is a divided book. In the first half, three character’s stories are told: two sisters and the hired hand Coop at the ranch. The first chapter, set in rural California, involves these characters in a tragedy, and each of the character’s stories is spun out separately […]

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  • Book Fight image of tag icon

    In an age where organizations mount campaigns to rescue book reviews from death, the number of independent bookstores drop year by year, and publishers bemoan their profit margins and wail about the difficulty of their job, it’s nice to see people fight over books. Yes, fight. No, not with words. More like fisticuffs, but less […]

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  • The Quarterly Conversation image of tag icon

    Issue Eight of The Quarterly Conversation has now been released! It includes my review of Haruki Murakami’s latest, After Dark, a review written in real-time (since the book is almost in real time). Some of the other highlights are a review of Daniel Alarcon’s novel Lost City Radio – an incredible book from an incredible […]

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  • Ouch image of tag icon

    On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s latest novel, received mostly favorable reviews after its release in Britain earlier this year, but today Michiko Kakutani lays out a nasty opener in the NY Times Review: “After two big, ambitious novels — “Atonement” and “Saturday” — Ian McEwan has inexplicably produced a small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses […]

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  • Interview with Jess Row image of tag icon

    Jess Row, recently named one of Granta‘s Best Young American Novelists, has written one collection of stories – The Train to Lo Wu – and is working on another, tentatively titled The Answer, that deals with religious fundamentalism in the aftermath of 9/11. We talked about how his fiction builds models of karmic processes, how […]

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  • Roundup: New Novels and Deprivation image of tag icon

    David Mitchell’s new novel. A bookstore owner burns books in protest of America’s lack of support for the written word. Um, actually, America supports the written word rather well, to the tune of 200,000 new books per year in America alone, so we just can’t handle the onslaught of the printed page. Also, depends what […]

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  • The Bomb, Dmitri … The Hydrogen Bomb. image of tag icon

    So I don’t normally post on BookFox about non-fiction titles, but I’m making an exception for William Langewiesche’s new book The Atomic Bazaar, which addresses the proliferation of nuclear weapons (if the title didn’t tip you off). I’ve been reading Langewiesche in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly for a while now, and his articles […]

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  • Open Letter image of tag icon

    Dear Ed, I miss you. I mean, the monkeys running your site are fun and all, but they’re even crazier than you (or maybe I’m just adjusted to your frequency of crazy). Certainly Erin O’Brien is crazier than you. Every post of hers is labeled with breasts. You would never do that, Ed. You would […]

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