Notes from Underground

After reading (and praising) Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, someone recommended that I read Notes from Underground because they consider it a real masterpiece. This book is older than the other books I had read, and much shorter.

From the blurb:

In full retreat from society, [the unnamed narrator] scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

I listened to the Audible narration of the book. Some points that stood out for me:

• A 40-minute foreword to a 4-hour book, going over it chapter by chapter, felt a bit pretentious.

• The narrator himself is fine, but the production is lacking. In places it’s very obvious that certain names have been re-recorded separately from the rest of the text, and in many places it sounds as if multiple takes have been spliced together.

• The main character argues that a chicken coop is acceptable only for practical survival, like staying dry during rain, but should never be mistaken for, or cherished as, a grand, ideal home. I liked this metaphor.

• During the first half of the book, I found it unusually hard to keep my attention on the narration. I didn’t mind Dostoevsky’s many-page philosophical treatises in the other books, but here it just failed to grab me.

• The second part of the book has some more plot in it, which made it easier for me to read and even made me sad when the story suddenly ended.

• I like how unreliable and self-contradictory the main character is. Seeing him fall apart in the second half of the book is not easy to read, but quite entertaining.

• Dostoevsky excels at writing characters that you want to punch in the face… repeatedly. :-)

This is not my favorite of Dostoevsky’s works, which apparently is not uncommon. I’m glad I read some of his later work before this one.