#340
Title: Notes from the Underground (a.k.a. Notes from Underground)
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Year: 1864/1992
Publisher: Dover
96 pages
Read as a Project Gutenberg electronic text.
I remind myself that reading a first, whether it's Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, or e. e. cummings, may be a tedious look backward. I don't think this would be published these days because it's not very interesting, but as an early example of its genre and style it was remarkable. From the present perspective, the narrator's whiny, snively, rumination and self-justification is a grating bore. The contemporary version is Alain Mabanckou's African Psycho, which tells the same story of a disturbed, inadequate, grandiose first person narrator who is self-loathing, highly ambivalent about women, and unable to muster the interior strength to enact his important manifesto about life on a prostitute.
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