Notes from Underground / The Double

A genius of a book written by a mind that can effortlessly delve into the nuts, bolts and avagadros of the psyche.


Regard this extract:

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

After the Upanishads, it took around 2500 human years for man to explore the innards of himself; By a drunkard and a pathological gambler to be this original, before the world show more wars, before the pentium processors, before blogging, before any one single man had any guts to sit in a corner and think for himself about himself and his insignificance in the scheme of things, is what makes this book a precious gem.



PS- My copy of the book is bound in an apt cover featuring the handsome self portrait of Kramskoy; Cant find it here. show less

Made me feel severely depressed and in need of human connection in the way only a Dostoyevsky novel can. Immediately questioned the meaning of my life and how I interact with the world. Pretentious bullshit, but I'll almost definitely cry over it the next time I get drunk.

A genius of a book written by a mind that can effortlessly delve into the nuts, bolts and avagadros of the psyche.


Regard this extract:

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

After the Upanishads, it took around 2500 human years for man to explore the innards of himself; By a drunkard and a pathological gambler to be this original, before the world show more wars, before the pentium processors, before blogging, before any one single man had any guts to sit in a corner and think for himself about himself and his insignificance in the scheme of things, is what makes this book a precious gem.



PS- My copy of the book is bound in an apt cover featuring the handsome self portrait of Kramskoy; Cant find it here. show less

I imagine Notes was just as difficult when it was published as it is now. The "story" is depressing and starts only in the second part of the novel. During the first part, I kept thinking, "How can the depressed extremes of this character ever be interesting? Is this book one long whine by a self-involved jerk?" As I read on, I started to understand that the man was relentless in following his motivations to their unsentimental beginnings. Uh-oh. This guy is doing something that very few of us do, and he's bragging about it. At that point, I knew I had better read on, no matter painful it gets. A cruel, self-centered, honest person.

This book contains two short novels that have some thematic common ground, which helps to explain why Penguin housed them in a single volume.

Notes from Underground:

This is a very dark and surprisingly modern novella in which an unsympathetic narrator, a retired junior civil servant, describes his gradual alienation from society, initially in a description of his philosophy, but then through narrating some of the episodes that led to his downfall. This book prefigures some of the themes of Crime and Punishment.

The Double:

This is an earlier novella that is more of a comedy, though the core story is a dark vision. Once again the narrator is a St Petersburg civil servant. This one sees himself as an essentially honest person, but gradually show more falls from grace, then encounters his double, a lookalike answering to the same name, who gradually takes over the "hero's" life. A compelling vision of a broken man trapped in his own nightmare show less

Hey wait, are you a misanthrope? Do you feel betrayed and disappointed with life? Are you a bitter, bitter man? Why narrator, I never would have guessed! Why don't you spend the next hundred pages telling me about it? That sounds like loads of fun.

I've not much to say about this book that hasn't been said before. Both stories are nice and deep.

'Notes from Underground' - a mind bender!