What a fantastic read. Very sad. Here is a man so caught up in his reasoning that he cannot give himself to sentimentality until it overwhelms him and leaves him full of self-loathing. His intelligence and self-awareness cripples him. As an alcoholic in recovery, I resonated very much with this person who has no spiritual guide to give him some brief reprieve from his mind. He can only occasionally sense the “sublime and beautiful.”
It ends with him breaking down in front of someone who thought him a savior, and she sees him with pity because she knows he is in a far worse position then she, who was capable of freeing herself from her suffering because she allowed herself to feel the torture she had previously undergone. She allowed the protagonist to reach her heart. He loathes her after she catches a glimpse of his. It is a sort of torture he cannot allow himself to feel without shame—he can only analyze it and express it by loathing others, poking them, trying to get them to react in some human form. He is stuck in the self, in samsara, no matter who wittily he examines it. He can only rant and rave in his inertia.
I cannot claim to understand the historical context of this novella, but psychologically it gripped me. I was already expecting to like it because two years ago I read The Brothers Karamazov and loved that one very much, and I was not disappointed.
The beginning was heavy, and took much patience and effort to digest, but after having devoted a year-and-a-half of my life to reading Gravity’s Rainbow no book is truly “difficult” anymore.
If I were to rank the Russians I have read, I would say: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, then Nabokov.
There is just something special about Dostoevsky; he is brilliant because I think he writes with his soul the way I’m not sure the rest do.
by ratchooga