TBK Post 2
Well, the plan I set forth in the previous post probably isn’t going to happen. I try and I try to find the time to write thoughtfully, and it ends up availing itself around 9:30 every night. As my five year old says, oy vey.
This is kind of a bummer, but not quite a basa, a Hebrew word (for which I’ve probably butchered the spelling) given to me by my pal Sara Sorcher. As I was reading the novel, I thought about how great it would have been to be studying it more formally. This thought most likely makes me a geek. But the thing about studying a novel is that you get a chance to think about it systematically, and if you’re studying it with the right peers and the right teacher, you get to test your initial assumptions and enrich your interpretation through the insights of others. Of course, with the wrong people, studying a book like this would just suck.
Look at me avoiding the issues. The horrible thing about not being able to summon the energy to look closely at the text at this point in the day is that I did spend part of an afternoon copying quotes on pages I had folded over. It turns out, probably not by coincidence, that those passages reside in the parts of the novel I have set out to engage in this post.
When I was 21, I read Trinity, by Leon Uris, and it changed my life. Seriously. I wanted to be Conor Larkin, though I was by temperament and physicality much better suited for Seamus. But Conor Larkin was this combination of strength and discipline and principle and courage that set my imagination on fire. It kindled an awareness of and a respect for the struggle of the Irish. The character made me become a better person by helping me to define for myself those parts of me that I wanted to be me, which were hidden by those parts of me I thought might in some way impress other people. I still have to say that Trinity is the best book I’ve ever read, if only because it’s the only 900 page book I’ve ever re-read, and then re-read parts of again.
A few years ago, I was talking with a guy named Tony Consiglio who used to teach with me and he said that his favorite Dostoevsky novel was TBK because of its sensitivity. I bought the book three years ago, and read a big chunk of Book I on my way to Roman and Reka Cebulski’s wedding a couple of Augusts ago, but I couldn’t find the time to get back into it. So I scratched my Dostoevsky itch with Notes from Underground, which I loved for an entirely different set of reasons, and The Gambler, which I finished out of a sense of obligation because I couldn’t find a character to root for (not that Notes has anything resembling the warm fuzzies in it).
After reading Notes, and talking about its somehow attractive bitterness with my good pal Carrie Meythaler, I found Tony Consiglio’s words popping into my head from time to time. The Gary Shteyngart character Alyosha Bob – if you like funny, read Absurdistan – was also summoning me to come back to the book. And so I picked it up again this summer, started reading it on early mornings on Long Beach Island, marking my page with the scorecard from Surf City Island Golf (miniature, that is), and kept awakening myself at 6:30 every morning so I could read for at least an hour before the two little lovelies awakened themselves and started nipping at my heels (that’s figurative: they’re little girls, not dogs).
This has been prelude to some discussion about Alyosha, which must needs be accompanied by a discussion of the Elder Zosima. The most compelling theme carried by these characters, really simply, is love. Zosima exudes love in all he does through the novel. He is scorned by some, accused by his critics of taking to Alyosha because Zosima has what gets called somewhere a Karamozovian sensualism, because he tells people to “Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it each day” (319). So much for not breaking out the quotes. But if I go into “Talks and Homilies,” I’ll never stop quoting the text.
Alyosha is an entirely selfless character. He is on a mission to bring others to their better selves without ever imposing judgment on them, and he is armed with love in a way that recalls to me the St. Patrick of Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. This is the love that negates fear, the love that intimidates fear from even trying to enter the house of Love. Yet it’s expression is so innocent, and the way Dostoevsky ends the book with the jubilant Kolya Krasotkin exclaiming “Hurrah for Karamazov!” is such a marked change from the ending of the other great classic of the same decade, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck plans to light out for the territories that have already been sivilized by white America.
Texts, I guess, don’t really allow you to say what happened after the story ends, but imagination does. So for me, Alyosha’s patience is Dmitri’s salvation, Ivan’s salvation, Grushenka’s salvation. They are drawn to his constancy, and so am I. So I’ve been telling myself, the same way I told myself I wanted to be Conor Larkin 21 years ago, that I want to be Alyosha Karamazov. Would it be so bad if, at the end of the year, Kolya Krasotkin is Hurrahing me? I could take it, knowing as I do that it would be some power working through me, not me myself, that would have earned the Hurrah.
Geez, I didn’t even get to Ilyushechka. Maybe next time.
Well, the plan I set forth in the previous post probably isn’t going to happen. I try and I try to find the time to write thoughtfully, and it ends up availing itself around 9:30 every night. As my five year old says, oy vey.
This is kind of a bummer, but not quite a basa, a Hebrew word (for which I’ve probably butchered the spelling) given to me by my pal Sara Sorcher. As I was reading the novel, I thought about how great it would have been to be studying it more formally. This thought most likely makes me a geek. But the thing about studying a novel is that you get a chance to think about it systematically, and if you’re studying it with the right peers and the right teacher, you get to test your initial assumptions and enrich your interpretation through the insights of others. Of course, with the wrong people, studying a book like this would just suck.
Look at me avoiding the issues. The horrible thing about not being able to summon the energy to look closely at the text at this point in the day is that I did spend part of an afternoon copying quotes on pages I had folded over. It turns out, probably not by coincidence, that those passages reside in the parts of the novel I have set out to engage in this post.
When I was 21, I read Trinity, by Leon Uris, and it changed my life. Seriously. I wanted to be Conor Larkin, though I was by temperament and physicality much better suited for Seamus. But Conor Larkin was this combination of strength and discipline and principle and courage that set my imagination on fire. It kindled an awareness of and a respect for the struggle of the Irish. The character made me become a better person by helping me to define for myself those parts of me that I wanted to be me, which were hidden by those parts of me I thought might in some way impress other people. I still have to say that Trinity is the best book I’ve ever read, if only because it’s the only 900 page book I’ve ever re-read, and then re-read parts of again.
A few years ago, I was talking with a guy named Tony Consiglio who used to teach with me and he said that his favorite Dostoevsky novel was TBK because of its sensitivity. I bought the book three years ago, and read a big chunk of Book I on my way to Roman and Reka Cebulski’s wedding a couple of Augusts ago, but I couldn’t find the time to get back into it. So I scratched my Dostoevsky itch with Notes from Underground, which I loved for an entirely different set of reasons, and The Gambler, which I finished out of a sense of obligation because I couldn’t find a character to root for (not that Notes has anything resembling the warm fuzzies in it).
After reading Notes, and talking about its somehow attractive bitterness with my good pal Carrie Meythaler, I found Tony Consiglio’s words popping into my head from time to time. The Gary Shteyngart character Alyosha Bob – if you like funny, read Absurdistan – was also summoning me to come back to the book. And so I picked it up again this summer, started reading it on early mornings on Long Beach Island, marking my page with the scorecard from Surf City Island Golf (miniature, that is), and kept awakening myself at 6:30 every morning so I could read for at least an hour before the two little lovelies awakened themselves and started nipping at my heels (that’s figurative: they’re little girls, not dogs).
This has been prelude to some discussion about Alyosha, which must needs be accompanied by a discussion of the Elder Zosima. The most compelling theme carried by these characters, really simply, is love. Zosima exudes love in all he does through the novel. He is scorned by some, accused by his critics of taking to Alyosha because Zosima has what gets called somewhere a Karamozovian sensualism, because he tells people to “Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it each day” (319). So much for not breaking out the quotes. But if I go into “Talks and Homilies,” I’ll never stop quoting the text.
Alyosha is an entirely selfless character. He is on a mission to bring others to their better selves without ever imposing judgment on them, and he is armed with love in a way that recalls to me the St. Patrick of Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. This is the love that negates fear, the love that intimidates fear from even trying to enter the house of Love. Yet it’s expression is so innocent, and the way Dostoevsky ends the book with the jubilant Kolya Krasotkin exclaiming “Hurrah for Karamazov!” is such a marked change from the ending of the other great classic of the same decade, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck plans to light out for the territories that have already been sivilized by white America.
Texts, I guess, don’t really allow you to say what happened after the story ends, but imagination does. So for me, Alyosha’s patience is Dmitri’s salvation, Ivan’s salvation, Grushenka’s salvation. They are drawn to his constancy, and so am I. So I’ve been telling myself, the same way I told myself I wanted to be Conor Larkin 21 years ago, that I want to be Alyosha Karamazov. Would it be so bad if, at the end of the year, Kolya Krasotkin is Hurrahing me? I could take it, knowing as I do that it would be some power working through me, not me myself, that would have earned the Hurrah.
Geez, I didn’t even get to Ilyushechka. Maybe next time.
posted by Mike McAteer @ 10:32 PM
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