Notes from the Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

With this review, I'll probably reveal myself to be an unthinking boob, but I have to be honest.  I didn't particularly enjoy Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground.  The writing is sometimes brilliant, the language (in translation, of course) is compelling at times, and the depth of the main character is occasionally intriguing.  But the story, well, there really is no story.  I am such a simple-minded reader of fiction that I like to see some semblance of a plot thread.  I enjoy seeing the transformation of a character or the resolution of the problem.  But I didn't see that here.

The novel, if we can call it that, is a rambling, first-person, account of an embittered, self-loathing civil servant.  His self-loathing leads him to, seemingly intentionally, attempt to make the lives of others miserable.  The first portion of the book, about a third, is his own reflection on misery.  It's not until almost halfway through that anything actually happens, when he becomes obsessed with an officer who refuses to give way when they pass on the street.  He then imposes himself uninvited on a social gathering of acquaintances, who clearly despise him (and whose antipathy the narrator seems to relish). He leaves them for a brothel, where he convinces the prostitute to leave her life there and come to him.  But when she does, he turns her away, continuing to spread his misery around.

I'm no Dostoyevsky scholar (obviously), but I know some of his other works are much better than this. It's almost as if he decided to try something new and experimental, which, arguably, he did.  Notes was first published in 1864, and can be seen as a precursor to the existentialism which gained wider readership in the works of Camus and Sartre (but those two writers actually told stories).

In the last paragraph, the narrator writes, "Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting. . . ."  Amen to that.  Not interesting, indeed.  Call me ignorant, call me stupid, call me obtuse, just don't call me to read this boring, depressing book again.