White Nights & other stories

This book is a collection of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short fiction. The titular story, White Nights, recounts the meetings on four consecutive nights of an unnamed narrator wandering the streets of St Petersburg with Nastenka, a young woman with whom he shares his past, his hopes & dreams, his loneliness, and in the end his realisation that he has fallen in love with her - alas that she loves another. Overall a powerful reflection on unrequited romance & vulnerability. The second* story, A Faint Heart, sees friends Arkady & Vasya do their best to lovingly encourage each other in their plans for the future, even as the latter of the pair gradually loses his mind from sleepless stress over unfinished work. Next, in A Christmas Tree and a Wedding, one Yulian Mastakovitch upsets a girl at a children's holiday party, and to the nameless narrator's surprise, marries her five years later. Then in Polzunkov we are spectators to an anecdote told at a social gathering - I get the impression it's much funnier in the original Russian, as there are several references to bad puns, which don't come through in the translation. In A Little Hero we follow the confusions of an eleven-year-old boy as he develops pubescent feelings for a woman staying at the same stately home as him, despite her making it her business to tease him constantly; this culminates in him showing off in front of her by riding an untamed horse & then performing a secret act of selfless, romantic service. And then finally, in Mr. Prohartchin, we are treated to a character study through the last living days of the eponymous elderly eccentric, which constitutes a powerful reflection on isolation, poverty, and ilness both mental & physical.

   Overall this is an excellent collection of psychologically compelling and beautifully written stories - though Dostoyevsky is obviously best known for his much meatier novels, like Crime & Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov** - this, and the other two works of his I've already read for this blog, are brilliant entry points to getting familiar with his style & modes of thinking before diving into the more intimidating lengthy works.

* Okay, third technically in the edition I was reading from - but the second was Notes from Underground which I've read separately recently & so skipped, even if it is, in my opinion, better than any of the other stories in this collection.

** Both of which I own and intend to read, along with also Demons & The Idiot - I'm just psyching myself up by reading his shorter works first.

Cosmicomics

This book is a collection of a dozen short stories by Italo Calvino, all of which orbit the general themes of creation & the living universe as a sort of cosmic joke. It's probably the weirdest thing I've ever read* & it's also a straight up work of genius. The sheer originality & scope of its subject matter is boggling yet it is so playfully written that I slipped my way through this is one three hour sitting. So - the short stories themselves; they're all narrated by a [maybe immortal? it's never clarified & it doesn't really matter] being called Qfwfq** & in them:

1. the moon is orbiting Earth long ago much more closely than it does nowadays, and some people make the most of the opportunity to sail out in little boats to just underneath it, climb onto it off a ladder, and harvest moon-milk.
2. a family living in a nebula experience domestic upset when a star and planets start to form in (and out of) their home.
3. Qfwfq leaves a "sign" in space (I imagine this as a kind of conceptual graffiti tag) & soon finds himself embroiled in a millions-of-years-long conflict with someone else who keeps erasing it.
4. nostalgic recollection of how nice it was when everyone lived together in the same infinitely small point, before the Big Bang.
5. a blossoming romance is cut short when the emergence of coloured light interrupts the would-be couple's differing conceptions of beauty.
6. Qfwfq & a friend start playing marbles with hydrogen atoms, keep getting more competitive, and end up responsible for the infinite expansion of space.
7. an amphibian finds himself conflicted when he falls in love with a reptile but is still very close to his great uncle, who is a stick-in-the-mud fish.
8. a Dean & one of his protégés start making bets on what will happen [on literally any topic] and over the millions of years things get out of hand, even though they're still keeping score.
9. one of the last surviving dinosaurs*** tries to ingratiate himself among the more mammalian creatures that replaced his kind.
10. Qfwfq finds himself in an eternal love triangle, ploughing through space on perfectly parallel lines to both the object of his desire & his romantic rival.
11. after seeing the message "I SEE YOU" written in light through his telescope, a stargazer becomes more and more obsessed with communicating across this vast gulf of spacetime.
12. the history of mollusc evolution told in the form of a love story.

   So yeh - some pretty big ideas there, all of which Qfwfq navigates with a narrative voice that is clear, likeable, at times poetic, at times deeply moving, often laugh-out-loud funny, always very very very cleverly composed. This has made me want to read much more by Calvino. If you're a fan of high-concept science fiction, or at all interested in flippant reflections on the nature of life, the universe, and everything - this book will go down you like an 8AM mug of coffee.

* I can't be bothered to scroll back through this blog's twelve year history to say for absolutely certain, but it's quite surely the weirdest thing I remember reading for a very long time.

** And trust me when I say that is one of the more pronounceable character names in this book - some of them have parentheses & indices in them. But unless you're reading this by means of audiobook that shouldn't be too much of a hindrance to following along.

*** This book was published in 1969 and the asteroid hypothesis for the dinosaur extinction wasn't posed until 1980, so we can forgive the staggered overlap here implied.

Heaven & Hell

This book is Aldous Huxley's appraisal of the means & legitimacy of, as well as roughly a history of, mysticism. The psychological mechanisms, the spiritual explanations, and the philosophical strings tying everything together, are all considered with profound yet very readable detail. An interesting little text if you're at all curious about the possibility of our experiencing the supernatural.

the Doors of Perception

This book is Aldous Huxley's autobiographical account of what happened when he took 0.4g of mescalin, the potent organic psychedelic used in certain Native American rituals, sat down under supervision, and waited to see what happened. And oh boy did something very happen. The title should tell you everything - what transpired was no mere blunt chain reaction of brain chemistry, even though on some level it was exactly that - but on an experiential level it was deeply spiritual, like seeing the world anew, afresh, through childlike eyes, with the ego quieted & forgotten & the human body simply becoming a vehicle for a mind that no longer separated itself from the consciousness of the universe, a conduit for beauty. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in, or skeptical of, the claims of psychedelia - though be warned, my main takeaway after reading this is that I really want to try mescalin & it's hard to come by in the UK.

Three Deaths

This is a short story by Leo Tolstoy reflecting on the nature of mortality through the deaths of two people and a tree. It's well-written, as you'd expect, but honestly I found its characters rather uncompelling & its themes fairly shallow - I probably wouldn't have read it at all if it hadn't been included as an addendum to the ebook I bought of Ivan Ilyich, but if you're a big fan of nineteenth-century Russian literature and want to just read as much of it as you can check it out.

the Death of Ivan Ilyich

This book is probably Leo Tolstoy's most famous novella* - and, thanks to its title, I don't need to be concerned about spoilers. So - yes, Ivan Ilyich is dead. After an opening chapter in which his social circle mournfully discusses this, we skip back in time to look at the dead man's life. He rose through the middle-class ranks of working & socioeconomic status relatively impressively, eventually settling himself as something of a sinecure, then bumps his hip during an ill-fated DIY project. This injury metastasizes into a slowly worsening chronic pain problem, and we watch in horrifically tragically well-described slow-motion as Ivan succumbs to isolation, self-pity, and fatalism.

   Here Tolstoy presents us with a powerful picture of how to [not] make the most of your life, however much you suffer throughout it. Ivan Ilyich is a warning to us all. Well worth a read if you want a shorter more manageable glimpse of the sheer human capacity of one of Russia's greatest.

* His most famous Much Longer works, War & Peace and Anna Karenina, I do own & intend to read someday, but much as I am treating that other famous verbose Russian fiction writer I am starting with the short ones to get used to the style.