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Title: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 0-679-73452-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 August, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.49 (85 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A study of human consciousness
Comment: "So long live the underground. I already carried the underground in my soul." This best epitomizes Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground.
The book is not easy to read let alone to digest. Dostoyevsky again placed some of his favorite arguments in the moth of a character (the 40-year-old underground man) he despised. The underground man self-proclaims to be angry and sick at the very beginning and goes out of his way to offend his readers. The book reads like a delirious man's babbling, in his own shy, wounded, and exorbitant pride. While a novel usually needs a hero, but here Dostoyevsky had purposely collected all the features of an anti-hero: self-contempt, wounded vanity, conceit, and sensitive ego.
Even though the underground man might be extremely egotistical and has no respect for others, Dostoyevsky never meant for him to have any surface appeal. The recurring themes of the narrative revolve around the underground man's alienation from society, which he despises, his bitter sarcasm, and the heightened awareness of self-consciousness. He larks to revenge himself for his humiliation by humiliating others. I don't think Dostoyevsky meant for the underground man to be liked and pitied by the readers. In fact, our anti-hero is inevitably targeted for Dostoyevsky's harsh satire.
The first part of the book (titled The Underground) introduces the anonymous underground man and his outlook on life. The second part (titled A Story of the Falling Sleet) sees how the man with heightened senses of ego and awareness submerges voluptuously into his underground, motivated by many contradictory impulses. Dostoyevsky paints not only a complex portrait of an anonymous personage who lacks surface appeal, but also a society in which people are so unaccustomed to living and the manners of which that they feel a loathing for real life. Notes from Underground is an egocentric man's monologue that is abound with fascinating nuance which reveals itself only upon close reading.
2004 (5)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Slime of His Time
Comment: The first words of this deeply disturbing, but powerful, novel are "I am a sick man....I am a spiteful man." and these may refer equally to the main character and to the author. Dostoevsky has written an amazing portrait of a loner, whose introverted, sick thoughts spill out on the pages in demented brilliance. The novel is a product of European cynicism, nihilism, and inertia, all of which reached a certain height in the paralyzed upper circles of 19th century Russia. Nobody could write such a book without some personal acquaintance with the mean moods of this anti-hero. The main character, who does nothing except hide from the world, is a total misfit, a loser in life at home, at work, and in love---a jerk, a dweeb, a dork, a geek in modern American parlance---yet through Dostoyevsky's clear prose, we see into his wounded soul. "Actually, I hold no brief for suffering, nor am I arguing for well-being." he writes, "I argue for...my own whim and the assurance of my right to it, if need be." He is apart from society, recognizes no social obligation. He argues that suffering is still better than mere consciousness, because it sharpens the awareness of your being, therefore suffering is in man's interest Someone who can argue that is not going to write an average novel. This is in fact not an average novel at all, but a book concerned with the play of ideas, ideas that flash around like comets and meteorites inside Dostoevsky's head. It can no more escape Dostoevsky's brain than a Woody Allen movie can escape Woody Allen.
The plot line of NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND is extremely slim. It concerns an underground man, a man like a rat or a bug, who lives outside, or more likely, underneath the world's gaze. It is a lonely, tortured life lived inside a single skull with almost no contacts with the rest of the world except for a vicious servant. The "action" of the book comes only when the protagonist worms his way into a dinner with former schoolmates. They don't want him, he despises all of them. So, as you can imagine, a good time is had by all. The underground man winds up in a brothel with an innocent, hapless prostitute named Liza. He wishes for some relationship, he immediately abhors the very thought of contact with another person. The result is worse than you can predict, though I will say that it involves "the beneficial nature of insults and hatred".
In the tradition of novels of introspective self-hatred, Dostoevsky's has to be one of the first. I wondered as I read how much Kafka owed him, for after all, the hero here is a cockroach too, only remaining in human form. I realized how much Dostoevsky had influenced the Japanese writers of the 20th century---Tanizaki, Mishima, Soseki, Kawabata, and others. The pages are brilliant, but full of vile stupidity, useless, arid intellectualism, hatred of one's best and love of one's worst qualities, withdrawal from life, and self-loathing. A less American novel would be hard to imagine. But, some of these characteristics are found in almost everyone at some point in their life, unpleasant as that realization may be. I have to give NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND five stars, though I can't say I enjoyed it. It is simply one of the most impressive novels ever written.
Rating: 4
Summary: logically fogged mind
Comment: Notes from the underground is a wonderful book that helps expand the mind into things one might never have challenged before. I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys overanalysing ideas to the point that it hurts. If you do plan on reading this book, I recommend you read just a few pages a day so as to keep yourself fresh and not overloaded with stuff. All in all i htink it is a genious book, hilarious at parts as well, and it deserves a salute from me!
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Title: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0553211757 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Idiot (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alan Myers, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0192834118 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Demons by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 0679734511 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Stranger by ALBERT CAMUS ISBN: 0679720200 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 March, 1989 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 0374528373 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 14 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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