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
More Rushdie 
The latest development in the furor over Salman Rushdie’s knighting is that the Pakistani clerics awarded Osama Bin Laden a title as well: A group of hardline Pakistani Muslim clerics said on Thursday they had bestowed a religious title on Osama bin Laden in response to a British knighthood for author Salman Rushdie. The Pakistan […]
Read More Congrats! Congratulations to Peter Orner for winning the VCU First Novelist Award for The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo.
Read More Salman Rushdie’s Knighthood From the San Francisco Gate comes a brief article offering a quote from Pakistan’s religious affairs minister: “If someone exploded a bomb on [Salman Rushdie’s] body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.” The International Herald Tribune reports that the protests and burning of effigies […]
Read More Roundup of Essays 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 […]
Read More Divisadero: Michael Ondaatje 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 […]
Read More Book Fight 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 […]
Read More The Quarterly Conversation 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 […]
Read More Ouch 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 […]
Read More Interview with Jess Row 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 […]
Read More
