November reading

I have slowly made my way through the Russian literature.  In truth, I have not enjoyed Tolstoy's short novels much, though The Death of Ivan Ilych certainly has its moments.  In some sense of course, it is the reverse of A Christmas Carol, where Ivan finally thinks over his whole life and realizes that he wasted it after all, but it is far too late to do anything about it.  Still, Tolstoy is honest enough to make it clear that had he recovered, Ivan would have gone right back to the same correct but empty life of before, which was his attitude almost until the very end.  Still, the last few pages where he starts thinking over his childhood and recalling sucking on plum pits definitely reminds me a bit of Proust.  Again, Remembrance is sort of the reverse of Ivan Ilych in that Ivan is not terribly introspective and would not be dwelling on his past except he is forced to due to his illness. I didn't care for The Devil at all, so, for me, Tolstoy has succeeded only somewhat in 2 out of 5 his short novels, which is a low success rate for sure.

I'd say that things should start accelerating after I get through Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, which is now the halfway point of the list but was originally the 2/3rd mark.  It may get tricky in that at least a few of these items need to be read as computer files, so I may have to do shuffling or trying to check out some items from Robarts for a second time.  Still, I think I will enjoy going through Turgenev again and then some of these Russian writers from the Stalin era.  Also, given that I am done with cycling for the season, I'll be able to read a bit more on transit (at least days it is not overwhelmingly crowded).

There is a very tiny chance that I will actually get through the rest of the Russians before December is out, though that seems exceedingly unlikely.  If it happens, I may switch over to Middlemarch before finally going back to the long-neglected von Rezzori...

I started Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell and bailed on it within a day.  I just didn't care for it, and I have to be a lot more ruthless in quitting on books that don't hold my attention or I will never get done.  In fact, I probably should have dropped Tolstoy's The Kreuzer Sonata also, but I figured I might as well read it once.  Lessing had a grave distrust of psychiatry as the major institution it had become by the late 60s (with tentacles everywhere and lots of major literary figures enthralled in therapy -- Berryman, Sexton, Plath, Lowell, etc.).  In fact, it is a bit hard to recall just how influential psychology was in popular culture of that time.  While today probably an even greater number of people are medicated and overmedicated, it is not as apparent in books and movies with a few exceptions (DeLillo's White Noise and a few others that have slipped my mind*).

I certainly am aware that quite a bit of literature from the late 60s and early 70s shares this interest in madness and, along with Laing's Knots, questions whether normal people are "sane."  I think this approach has really fallen out of favor, perhaps in part due to the emptying out of mental hospitals with many mental patients ending up as the homeless.  It is much easier to tell yourself that "No, I'm not crazy" when the reference case shifts so dramatically.  I also wonder if literature is generally returning (even more) to its function as an escape valve as the economy gets increasingly pinched for the middle class.  Readers don't have time to ponder whether they are crazy (or if the whole rat race is a rigged game and they are frauds for participating, see Ivan Ilytch) and when they do read it is more for pleasure.

In any event, I remember Lessing's ambivalence towards psychologists in The Golden Notebook, but this seems to have turned to outright scorn in Briefing, which generally turns me off.  Added to this are the endless descriptions of floating on an imagined raft (in its own way as self-indulgent as John Barth's The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, which I also didn't care for).  And a lame ending (I peeked ahead).  So it wasn't hard to drop this and move on to the first volume of Herzen.

In other news, I seem to have lost another hard drive in the sense that it can't be recognized by the computer and thus all data is lost.  Grrrr!  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: "To lose one {hard drive} may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."  The worst of it is that this is where I seem to have stored the Girl Genius PDFs.  I have been in contact with Studio Foglio over another missing award, and perhaps they will allow me to download these again.  Now I do have an inkling that I burned them to a data DVD when my hard drive was close to overloading, but it could take weeks before I can put my hands on all the data DVDs and they are in no kind of useful order, so that is a major undertaking, but if I take it seriously, then almost all other activity, including creative writing, will come to an end.  I'm not quite ready to commit to that yet.

* Probably a good topic for a future post, but it is just too much of a distraction for me now.