The Gambler (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There's nothing less interesting to read than a stupid character. It's difficult to care about any of their observations because their lack of ability robs any respect for them you may have had. The plot no longer hits like it should because things happen due to stupidity rather than providence.

I've read little Dostoyevsky thus far but the one thing you can always expect from him are hyper-intelligent, introspective characters. They're a joy to read even when they're not particularly happy or well-adjusted individuals because their own ruminations—done so dryly and uninterestingly by lesser writers—are so genuine they cause us to call into question our own actions and motivations. Dostoyevsky's character play is what I enjoyed most from this novel, along with the obvious passion stemming from his own personal experience with gambling addiction and his infatuation with one of his students, represented in this story by Polina.

The problem with this book is that it feels oddly top-heavy. The first three-quarters are spent introducing us to the locale and the characters and their dynamics. It's enjoyable enough as a lead-in, but before you know it, the book is wrapping things up. Surely this abrupt conclusion is due the real-life circumstances of Dostoyevsky being forced to produce this book in 26 days in order to pay off his own gambling debts, but it hurts because there's a really spectacular novel in here exploring the damages of addiction (perhaps not just limited to that of the gambling variety) that will never be written. Instead of a slow slide downwards into a life ruined by addiction, it all occurs in the final 20 pages or so of the book as nearly two years are compressed into one chapter, robbing us of its intended and deserved impact. The ending is perfect but lacks punch that would have occurred had its second half been drawn out a bit.

Despite this, I still liked it, and I'm fighting the urge to pick up Crime and Punishment before finishing some more of the open books on my nightstand. Nobody writes characters like Dostoyevsky—I can't get enough of them. As for The Gambler in particular, it's well worth reading, but I am going to assume it isn't one of his best.

⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

“Do you know that one day I'll kill you? I won't do it because I'm no longer in love with you, or because I'm jealous, but—I'll just kill you for no better reason that I sometimes long to devour you.”

The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London

London's novel explores the theme of civilization vs. the wild in a readable, unpretentious fashion. It's often poetic and quite a beautiful read. As a dog lover I found it to be particularly compelling on an emotional level. I'm not sure if it'd have the same impact on somebody not as enamored with dogs, but otherwise I'd suggest it as a read to folks of all ages.

I liked The Call of the Wild but I found almost all of the dialogue to be stilted and unnatural. It puzzled me as to why two Frenchmen might speak to each other in their broken English instead of their native language, and I found their accents to be rather silly caricatures of what real French Canadiens sound like. Ditto to the Americans in the beginning of the novel.

On the other hand, London's narration is satisfying and at times profound:

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. 

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move. 

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.

It left a lasting mark on me.

I enjoyed Buck's early squabbling with pack leader Spitz, and found their machinations to be almost political in nature. I also found Buck's introduction to and later relationship with John Thornton quite touching. At times they reminded me of my bond with my own dog, a male crossbreed like Buck, to whom I feel similarly tied to. I felt Thornton to be a kindred spirit in this manner:

Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it.

Highly recommended for dog lovers. Push past the tough scenes in the beginning; what comes later is all the more rewarding for having experienced them.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dance Dance Dance (1988) (The Rat, #4) by Haruki Murakami

Work hard. Live modestly. Look at the big picture.

Dance Dance Dance is surprisingly excellent.

Not that I expected it to be bad. Rather, I didn't really expect anything because Dance hardly gets talked about at all within discussions of Murakami's work. I've heard almost exclusively that Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are his best novels, with small but adamant groups also touting Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or sometimes 1Q84. But there is almost no mention of Dance Dance Dance in these discussions.

Perhaps this is because so few people have read Murakami extensively. He has a reputation for having a short shelf-life, mostly due to the fact that he reuses many of the same tropes over his novels. The fact that Dance is the fourth episode in Murakami's only multi-novel series leads me to believe that people either shy away from picking this up without first reading the prior novels—rightly so, in my opinion—or, they're reading it independently without the proper lead-in of the prior episodes— Hear the Wind Sing , Pinball, 1973 , and A Wild Sheep Chase —which is a mistake, in my opinion, since many of the events in Dance are a callback to prior novels that require your experience with them to have the proper impact.

No matter the reason, my point is that this book doesn't have the glowing reputation it deserves.

This is the sixth Murakami novel I've read as of my typing this, and I've read all three of the prior books of the Rat series, so perhaps I'm uniquely equipped to receive the quality of this book in ways which not many other folks reviewing this on Goodreads are.

I resolved to read Murakami's works in order of publishing after completing Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) earlier this year. Having finished the first three entries in the Rat series (1979-1982), I picked up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) and Dance Dance Dance (1988) in audiobook form to consume while traveling in Southeast Asia. I began both nearly at the same time and intended to "read" them concurrently since I had just finished A Wild Sheep Chase and wanted the events of that book fresh in my mind when reading Dance—which is a direct sequel to it—but I found Dance to be so compelling right out of the gate that I set down Hard-Boiled almost immediately.

Witnessing Murakami's personal progress as a writer throughout The Rat series is a treat. Each book makes huge leaps in quality. The first two are almost not worth reading. A Wild Sheep Chase is a good book, but very uneven, as its first half meanders along before closing out strongly. And then comes Dance, by far the best book in the series and its conclusion. You can chart Murakami's growth as a writer through each entry in the series even without considering his two "experiments" of his early career (Norwegian Wood, a comparably reserved coming-of-age sexual awakening tale which I loved, and the aforementioned Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a mind-bending trip down the rabbit-hole blending cyberpunk and fantasy which I'm currently in the middle of). And that growth is astounding. He went from a writer who, though already skilled at putting his thoughts into words, was not quite skilled at expressing exactly what he wanted to say, or how he wanted to say it—and perhaps aping other writers he enjoyed a bit too much along the way—to a fully fledged postmodern writer in his own right. It's a bit tough to get through some of his early stuff, but I greatly enjoyed witnessing the growth firsthand and I'm glad I did it.

I've left too many loose ends hanging. So now I'm trying to tie up as many of those loose ends as I can.

In the most concise manner in which I could judge it, I'd describe Dance Dance Dance as the culmination of early Murakami and the best work of his early career.

I find it most easy to compare this book primarily to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, one which nearly everyone who has read Murakami has picked up since it's one of his top two or three most famous works. I find them to be quite similar to one another. They share similar themes of existential worry, the monotony of having your spirit pulverized by ennui, and thirtysomething protagonists who feel lost and unaccomplished. They also feature the same common Murakami tropes that he's famous for: The lost girlfriend/wife, the platonic teenage companion, psychic characters, otherworldly locations. The difference is that Dance executes its ideas in such a more polished, concise, cohesive manner than Wind-Up Bird does. Dance resolves nearly all of the questions remaining from its prior entries along with those within its own pages. Wind-Up Bird doesn't have the added baggage of previous entries and still it does not even answer its own compelling questions; something that bothered me about it and damaged its value in my judgment. Dance also feels far more smoothly paced. Probably it lacks the highest highs of Wind-Up Bird—Kamiya's backstory, or the cause of Cinnamon's dumbness—but it comes nowhere near the lows Wind-Up Bird dips into with its needless ambiguity and contrived weirdness. Dance is also incredibly readable, with Murakami's signature smooth, fluid prose that turns a 10-minute reading session into a ninety minute block in which you realize too late that you're now only going to get 6 hours of sleep before waking for work tomorrow.Murakami's character writing shows a huge improvement over past books, and even trumps some of his characters in later books such The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Gotanda, the narcissistic actor with perhaps more than a bit of a serial killer streak, was a favorite of mine. He reminded me a bit of the Trader in Murakami's short story Barn Burning. I also really liked the character of Yuki, whom I found sounded like a genuine teenager—the teenage "voice" being something that seems par-for-the-course for middle-aged writers to bungle in frequently hilarious ways. The minor characters are also colorful and memorable; the one-armed poet Dick, the subpar and uninspired yet still successful writer named Hiraku Makimura—clearly a self-deprecating reference to the author himself after Murakami's own success following the more mainstream Norwegian Wood, which he published only a year prior to Dance Dance Dance. These characters occupy little pagecount but are memorable diversions nonetheless and serve to break up what could have been a bit of a dry narrative without them.

Like other Murakami lovers, I often find it difficult to articulate why he's so appealing to me. I don't care much for his themes because, as a relatively happy person who is satisfied with my life and facing no existential crisis, I don't much relate to them. And I'm not a huge fan of fantasy or magical realism in the first place. But when I read Murakami he has a way of communicating to me that seems more efficient than other authors are able to. I read him more quickly, I'm more easily able to grasp the ideas he's exploring than other authors, and I feel like I know his characters more intimately with much less exposure. It's as if he has a direct link to my brain. I love reading his work.

Murakami's prose is often akin to comfort food to me—easily and pleasurably consumed, though rarely as soulfully nourishing and impactful as a lot of classic literature I've read. I tear through his work at speed but rarely double back to reread certain passages, or pause to let their beauty wash over me as I've done with English written by Nabokov or a Brontë. Dance Dance Dance, however, is the first time I've felt that notion challenged, and for it to shine even through translation is remarkable.

This book features more profound and poetic passages than any other work of his I've read thus far:

“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

“Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.”

“People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.”

“I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.”

“She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.”

If you like Murakami, Dance Dance Dance is a must-read. It's gorgeous, fluid, profound, and pacey. It's the high point of his work so far, but the barrier to entry is somewhat high, because if you want to get the most out of Dance Dance Dance, I highly recommend that you read The Rat series in order:

1) Hear the Wind Sing (1979)
2) Pinball, 1973 (1980)
3) A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)
4) Dance Dance Dance (1988)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thumbelina (1846) by Hans Christian Andersen

A spritelike young girl adrift in a stream, on a lilypad with a leashed butterfly as a sail. A narrow shaft of light shining down upon a dead swallow in an underground mole's tunnel. A white-winged fairy floating to and fro amidst white flowers peppering marble ruins twined with grapevines, all glittering in the sunlight.

Thumbelina is full of wondrous, fantastical imagery. It's a heartwarming, touching and transcendental story. The creatures Thumbelina meets along her journey feel genuine and almost human, and she's confronted with their selfishness, jealousy, and bitterness. They provide a foil to her childlike innocence and kindness, and remind us that while such virtues often render you vulnerable, they can also be a powerful way of affecting the world and the people around you.

Thumbelina is an eessential fairy tale packed full of Andersen's endless creativity, and a must-read for adults and children alike.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Little Claus and Big Claus (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

There's something innately calming about Andersen's style that heightens his stories beyond just his impressive creativity. His storytelling is so casual, even when violence or evil occurs (which it does, often) within them. This unpretentiousness imparts a sense of sitting around the fire and listening to your grandmother speak the words rather than—in my specific case—reading one every so often in my office as I take a break from working. It reminds me of filmmaker Wes Anderson's work; timeless, whimsical, colorful.

While the stories themselves are not universally appealing to my tastes, I almost always find myself immediately enraptured whenever I do open one of his tales. This is telling of his quality, considering I typically prefer overly serious and more subtle stories and Andersen's work is most certainly not that. I believe their appeal should be nearly universal; to children and adults regardless of personal preference. Indeed history has shown it so, as these stories have been read and enjoyed for nearly two centuries and adapted (even aped) into countless other forms of media.

Little Claus and Big Claus is one of his less well-known stories, but one I enjoyed more than some of his other stuff I've read. Little Claus is an unabashed con-man who regularly outwits Big Claus, and I was also pleasantly surprised to see the dark humor the story features, as my own sense of humor is like a strong cup of black coffee.

I read a Tiina Nunnally translation of the original Danish, whom I believe has also done a well-regarded translation of the Scandinavian classic Kristin Lavransdatter. I found her work adequate. There are times which I could tell I was reading a translation, but such is to be expected if you want something reasonably accurate to the source material. I imagine it would be difficult to do a better job and thus I'd recommend her.

My recommendation: Read Hans Christian Andersen. Read him if you like Pixar. Read him if you like Harry Potter. Read him if you like Wes Anderson. And read him if you don't like these things anyway, because he'll probably still appeal to you on one level or another.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Tinderbox (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

Andersen certainly doesn't lack for imagination, but I was hoping for a bit of a darker turn that I didn't get.

The moral of the story: If you want to gain wealth and station, all you need to do decapitate an old lady and adopt 3 dogs.

⭐⭐⭐

The Princess and the Pea (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

Without artwork supporting it this is less a short story and more a satirical parable, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and found it similar in tone to some of the satirical, biting short fiction of Mark Twain.

⭐⭐⭐

Notes from Underground (1864) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler.

Once upon a time, one thousand years ago when I was in college, I sat on the bed studying as my girlfriend read Crime and Punishment beside me. She was really smart. Probably she still is. I wouldn’t know. Anyway, she’d break periodically only to take a note or two while cursing under her breath in complaint to Fyodor Dostoyevsky. She was clearly frustrated by the density of his work. I commented something, probably in passive-aggressive annoyance at her for disturbing my own studies, which led her to hint quite condescendingly that I (a history major and reading comparably brain-lite, if dry, material) would never be able to finish a book on the level of Crime and Punishment because it was too dense and too philosophical for a mouth-breather me. I, of course, took offense to this, and, bothered by the challenge, bought a copy for myself.

And would you believe it? She was right. I put down Crime and Punishment within the week. I think I only made it about a hundred pages before giving up.

I’ve tried to read Dostoyevsky three times in my life.

The first attempt was the aforementioned impotent, doomed salvo I launched back in what must have been 2004 or 2005, when the ideas Dostoyevsky bowled me over pretty much right off the bat. I was so ill-equipped to read him I wasn’t even familiar with the philosophies he was examining and the established theories and schools of thought he was challenging, much less able to think critically about the way he was doing so and draw my own conclusions including the consideration of his work.

I tried again five or six years after that, when I attempted The Brothers Karamazov after hearing it was the greatest, most fantastic novel ever written on Reddit or some damned place. I failed again. At this time I considered myself a pretty intelligent fellow (I’ve now read far too much and spoken with far too many actually smart people to still believe that), so I felt obligated after two such embarrassing failures to provide a reason to myself to try and save face, so I blamed the translations for being too stuffy (Constance Garnett) or having weird syntax (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). I’ve now come around to the fact that it was I who was the problem. My education never prepared me for the onslaught of existential ideas that Dostoyevsky would state with one sentence and knock to pieces with the next. Forget his density; I couldn’t even handle his subject matter. Reading Dostoyevsky in these two attempts was like an illiterate man looking at a dinner menu. After enough studious concentration I could probably sound out the words to the point that I could maybe get an idea of what I was looking at, but I wasn’t really sure enough of what it was saying to order a meal I knew I’d enjoy. So instead of winging it and potentially embarrassing myself, I’d just put down the menu and leave and go home and make a PB&J sandwich and cut the crusts off.

I tell you this all, gentlemen, mostly because I’m elated that Dostoyevsky has finally clicked with me on this third try and I’m exceedingly proud of that fact, as you can probably already tell from my tone.

It did take a hell of an adjustment period, though. I think I read the first few pages of Notes from the Underground more than four times over the past few weeks before finally picking it up and pushing through. Initially it felt the same as every other time I’d picked up Dostoyevsky before and I genuinely wondered (maybe for the first time) if I simply lacked the baseline level of intelligence to read him and find him enjoyable. The more I read, though, the closer I felt like I was coming to a point of it ‘clicking’ with me, until I finally did.

“Oh shit, I’m actually getting this! It’s working, it’s working! It’s a Unix system, I know this!”

Eureka!

In Notes from Underground Dostoyevsky has a way of challenging your worldview, but doing so in a way that feels honest—or at least honestly crafted—and in a narrative voice which, in this case, is wholly unique from probably any I’ve ever read before. Without the Underground Man’s voice it would probably be too dry to dig through, and without all of the substance he’s saying, it would naturally seem more hokey and less realistic. There’s something extremely compelling about the bitter, anarchic, nihilistic existential tirade of an extremely intelligent but seemingly unhinged, contradictory, masochistic man, and trying to counter that with your own thoughts, backed up by your own personal philosophy—all within your own head during a 20 second break of actually reading it.

I found reading Notes to be a stimulating mental exercise, but reading it in this fashion is absolutely exhausting, and I needed plenty of space to consider what he was saying and my reaction to it: What might be right or wrong about these notions? Is there any value to this statement, or can dismiss it outright? And—perhaps more interestingly—what kind of a person (or in this case, the character) must someone be to believe this? The final question making this one of the best books I’ve read.

This is a story with one character (well, there are more, but really, it's just Underground Man) in which very little happens. I’m not studied enough on the author to say whether or not the narrator is actually expressing Dostoyevsky’s own thoughts and beliefs. It’s certainly more impressive if he’s not, and Dostoyevsky has created this character and this character’s mental process from scratch. I assume that to be true, and thus I believe this to be one of the most unique, compelling fictional characters I’ve ever read. It’s a timeless character as well; a genuine, honest representation of a social malcontent; a pariah. The Underground Man will probably always feel relevant to anyone who reads him so long as they reside in civilized human society, because every civilized human society in recorded history has had its outcasts. It grew more and more obvious to me as I continued reading that I knew this guy, and of course I did. You do, too. He's every YouTube poop creator, every well-spoken Twitter troll, every 4chan commenter, every Reddit incel. He will always exist; we will all always know him until such a time as our consciousnesses are uploaded into vast computers and we transcend our humanity. And even then there will probably be computers floating off on the edges of populated space transmitting the same shit Underground Man is. Modern technology has only given Underground Men (and women, I suppose) a megaphone with which to soapbox, making this novel perhaps more relevant now than it was even at the time of its publishing.

As detestable as Underground Man can be, I can’t say enough about what he’s made me aware of within myself. I'm a reader, at times a loner, and even, when darker moods strike, similarly bitter and misanthropic. So Underground Man has also challenged me; he's caused me to more closely examine and regulate the way I view and treat others so I don't someday turn into him. I think everybody reading this novel can relate to him on some level, and that's the brilliance of it.

Of course, reading the scribbling of a social invalid who has isolated himself to revel in the disgust and mockery of society and humanity for decades isn’t always going to be an enjoyable pursuit, and it did take me a while to get through Notes even though its length puts it closer to a novella than a full novel. I can’t speak for Dostoyevsky’s other work (as we’ve already covered in probably too much detail), but Notes from the Underground is definitely not for everyone. This book is extremely introspective. It’s all about ideas, and human existence, and not much about anything that physically happens within its pages. And that’s going to be pretty polarizing. A lot of people aren’t into fiction for that reason. They want plot action and character interaction. So Notes from the Underground is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s totally fine—It’s completely valid to dislike this and it doesn’t (necessarily) mean you’re as dumb as I was (am?) when I first tried reading him.

So what changed, then? Why was I able to read this now?

The shortest answer is that I don’t really know. I haven’t continued my education through any official means. But throughout the past few years I’ve embarked on a quest in my spare time to try and enrich my mind by learning basic economics, philosophy, and ethics, in addition to continuing my self-education in history and reading as much classic literature as possible. Perhaps these pursuits slowly but surely imparted on me the basis of knowledge I required in order to read Dostoyevsky and actually enjoy reading Dostoyevsky. Or maybe I just wanted it more this time, like they say about sportsmen playing in some Extremely Important Sports Competition, like the Superbowl or the World Cup.

I look forward to attempting Crime and Punishment again very soon, and—this time—finishing the bastard and actually getting something out of it.

Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear

You know, writing this thing up again has really made me think. When it comes down to it I guess you could say that a condescending offhand remark by an ex-girlfriend 15 years ago led me to devote years of painstaking study into improving my own intellect to the point where I could read a Dostoyevsky book and find almost half of it enjoyable. I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. But above all, I am a truly insecure man.

In my defense, though, I still really hate reading Constance Garnett and Pevear & Volokhonsky. With a passion.
So surely my initial assumption was correct and it was their fault all along.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

In any case civilization has made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves.

The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.

“What is to be done with millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness.

In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort.

We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.

Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else… Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!