Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

2 stars

First Sentence: I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man.

Thoughts: You know how sometimes when you’re reading a book you’ll get a song stuck in your head? That happened as I was reading Notes from Underground. As the narrator went on and on about his life and beliefs I kept thinking of this song:

Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
I guess I’ll go eat worms

The narrator of this novella hates himself and did his damnedest to make sure everyone else hates him too. The first half of the story is him using this technique on us, the readers. He went on a rant about how much the whole world sucked and how much he hated it before going to a flashback to explain how he ended up scribbling notes in a basement.

Twenty years earlier the narrator was able to go out in public and at least appear to be a functioning member of society. He hated everyone even then, mostly for no reason but a psychologist would detect deep feelings of inadequacy that he was trying (badly) to cover up. I guess that’s why this is called a psychological novel. You’d need years of training that field to uncover all the problems this guy has. National Geographic nothing, The Times of London is in awe of all his issues.

We are treated to a long interlude about a particular soldier Narrator hated. He noticed when the soldier walked down the street, people got out of his way due to his commanding posture and purposeful bearing. Narrator decided to heck with this guy, he wasn’t going to get out of his way anymore. In fact he was going to bump into him in the street on purpose! That’ll show him! Who does he think he is, having confidence like that? Narrator puts his Cunning Plan into action: he goes into debt buying a new fur collar for his coat and a new hat so the soldier, who doesn’t know Narrator from Adam’s house cat, won’t recognize him. Then he bumps into him. The soldier barely notices him and goes on his way. Why that little so-and-so, sputters Narrator.

In another story, he tells about the time he invited himself to a party for a former schoolmate who got a promotion. He didn’t like this schoolmate and vice versa, but since he happened to be in the room when a couple of Schoolmate’s friends were discussing the party he decided that he was going to go too. He showed up an hour early and then spent the rest of the evening pacing back and forth across the room while everyone else ignored him. When they left, Narrator followed them to a House of Ill Repute where he spent the night with a prostitute who really deserved better. The rest of the book is Narrator degrading the prostitute and making her cry.

Clearly Dostoevsky was not in a good place when he wrote this. Fyodor, honey, are you okay? I know your wife was dying when you were working on this story. I know that’s rough. Do you need me to bring over a casserole and a sympathetic ear? Seriously, I’m worried about you a hundred and sixty years in the future.

DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi

1 star

First Sentence: the waist of a nation

Thoughts: What the hell did I just read?

No, really, what in the actual hell was this book? The description claimed that it was about the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea. That alone intrigued me because that was where Eclectic Dad was stationed when he was in the Army in the early 1970s. He had nothing good to say about it except that it was better than being sent to Vietnam. I thought it might be interesting to see what the DMZ was like through Korean eyes. I still think that might be an interesting book to read because this sure as shootin’ wasn’t it.

Not to say there weren’t any good points to this book. The first section was a bit too navel-gazey for me, but the next couple were great. There was a section about a man named Ahn Hak-sop who lived in the Civilian Control Zone right after the Korean War. He was a Communist and the CCZ was on the South Korean side so there was definitely some mistrust there. The kind of mistrust that got him thrown into prison and tortured for years. The following section was a series of prose poems/letters written from the point of view of children who survived a massacre on the border. Even though these stories were horrifying in their depiction of man’s inhumanity to man, they were still good in that they depicted what living on the DMZ did to people and how it split the Korean consciousness.

And then the book went straight off the cliff into some kind of avant-garde experimentalism. Words were written backwards. There were meandering musings on random phrases. There was a whole section of repeated drawings of blue women. I started wondering if I should be reading this book sober. Then I started wondering if I was sober. Was I real? Was this real? Am I in some kind of mirror universe where nonsense made sense?

Just as I was about to get up to check myself in the mirror to make sure I hadn’t grown a goatee, I got to the last section where sense reasserted itself and words were written from left to right again. It was a collection of photographs taken by the author’s father who had been a photojournalist in Korea in the 1950s and 60s interspersed with her memories of growing up in Korea in the 1960s.

The ending was good. The beginning was good. The rest of it was not. It was like biting into a sandwich made with freshly-baked bread and finding out the filling was used cat litter. And this won the National Book Award for poetry last year. I can see why. It’s the kind of book pretentious people would like because it allows them to show off how educated they are. Pretentious people are on the National Book Award committee and their votes count for more than my opinion.

But what do I know? I just have a Master’s degree in Postcolonial Literature. Which might be the problem. I majored in postcolonial works, not pretentious ones.