Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

I don’t remember how I came across Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, but I remember that it took me the better part of a year to read it. This was largely a problem of format, since my copy was an ebook gifted to me by a friend. If an ebook isn’t a library loan or a book club read, then it is doomed to take forever because I’ll treat it as a backup book to pull out in desperate times rather than an active project with a looming deadline.

Burnout was published in early 2024, so Proctor is addressing very recent political events; she began writing it during the COVID lockdowns in response to the electoral defeats of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. The book obviously went to press before Trump’s re-election, however, and I wonder how different the book would (or wouldn’t) be if she had started writing in 2024 rather than 2020.

To quote directly from the back-of-the-book summary from publisher Verso:

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that question, Hannah Proctor draws on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.

Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward – neither denial nor despair. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants have made sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organise at once, and to do both without compromise.

Perhaps it’s my own inattentive, piecemeal reading that’s to blame here, but having finished the book I’m not sure I can articulate “how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.” Nor can I really describe the different way forward that Proctor is offering, beyond “quashing the individual for the sake of the movement doesn’t work.” Maybe my brain is simply too melted from easily digestible pop science and self-help books with punchy, pithy bulleted lists to grasp the more complicated or ambiguous solutions she raises.

Even if my brain is fully melted, the historical scope of Burnout still made it a rewarding read for me. Proctor covers a broad swathe of leftist organizing history through eight discrete concepts: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning. Each concept is illustrated by specific historical movements or moments, such as exiled Communards as a framework for looking at nostalgia. Reading it felt like catching up on years and years of history that I should have already known about. Now that I have the history in place, I can give it a more careful re-read and come away with a better understanding of the lessons Proctor believes we can learn.

Döden och pingvinen

Nothing like book clubs for finding new books and keeping you on track for reading goals!

Andrey Kurkov’s Döden och pingvinen (Death and the Penguin) was the pick for my WhatsApp book club, a motley international crew put together by an American online acquaintance currently residing in Türkiye. She also happens to have a background in Russian literature, so between her own history and the diversity of geographies in the group, the selection ends up being pretty eclectic.

Döden och pingvinen is a satire and a farce, and was generally a fun relief from other books I had on the go at the same time (e.g. a revisit of Rien où poser sa tête, which deserves to be required reading in the face of ongoing ICE raids in the US). Viktor is a struggling writer in post Soviet Kyiv who suddenly finds himself with a new job: writing obituaries for still-living people of note. He also happens to own an emperor penguin named Misha. These two factors bring a whirlwind of new people into his life, but of course things quickly spiral out of control and Viktor eventually finds himself in the crosshairs.

A lot of the satire probably missed me since I’m not intimately familiar with the post-Soviet politics of Ukraine in the mid-90s. That knowledge might have provided some structure to the story; as it was, most of the time the story revolves around things just happening to Viktor. This works fine as satire—when absurd things happen to a straight-laced protagonist, there’s still narrative satisfaction to be had—but in the last act of the story, the satire takes a backseat to actual pathos. People have died (or are at least presumed dead), Viktor’s life is in danger, and an aura of menace hangs over his newly-found loved ones. In that kind of situation, the protagonist’s lack of action becomes more frustrating. There are also events in the first part of the book that have a foreshadowing aura, where you expect they will be part of a coming plot twist or complication, but nothing ever comes of them. When Döden och pingvinen is straight comedy, it’s fantastic, but when it starts to dip into spy thriller territory it gets slightly confused and deflating. The ending, too, is much more of a downer than the first several chapters would suggest. Black humor is definitely a thing, absolutely, but for me it wasn’t quite the same. I don’t want to get too into the weeds with that, though, because I consider it a spoiler.

It’s also not worth noting except in passing my deep, world-weary sigh at Viktor’s love interest. Another man approaching 40 who gets a “barely legal” ingenue dumped in his lap, as was the style at the time.

Most of us were in agreement that the book started off strong but that by the end we were the most concerned about what would happen with Misha the penguin. Good news for us, Kurkov wrote a sequel!

Tordyveln flyger i skymningen

I once heard someone describe the experience of relocating to another country as “having a childhood that is now totally irrelevant.” The flip side of that coin is that you’re constantly playing catch-up with the childhood that most of the people around you share. Maria Gripe was part of that cultural catch-up for me. I’d never heard of her before I moved here, but weirdly enough no one mentioned her either. I only added her to my TBR list after a profile of her in a past issue of Historiskan, and when I brought home Tordyveln flyger i skymningen (“The Dor Beetle Flies at Dusk”) my partner was pleasantly surprised.

“I loved that one as a kid!”

Not enough to mention it to me, I guess?

Other books by Maria Gripe have come out in English but, as far as I can tell, this one hasn’t. Neither has the radio drama, and the new miniseries from SVT only has Swedish subtitles. Once again, I’m writing a book report in English about a book that’s not available to English readers.

One summer, three children in a fictional Småland village—siblings Annika and Jonas, and their friend David—discover a hidden cache of letters at the abandoned Selanderska house. With that a two-hundred-year-old history is uncovered that includes ancient Egyptian statues, curses, Carl Linneaus, unhappy love affairs, and psychic plants. There are discoveries and disappointments along the way, but in the end they come to a quiet but satisfying conclusion.

All of that would have been my jam as a tween, so it was a fantastic bit of escapism for me, a throwback to favorites like The Dark is Rising and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The only hiccup for me was the writing style: Gripe favors short, slightly choppy sentences with a profusion of exclamation marks, to the point where Child Me might have felt a bit condescended to. I felt the same way about books for children that didn’t use contractions, for example.

On a more positive note, much of the story is advanced through conversations and dialogue, and while that can get tiresome when poorly handled, in this instance it works. Tordyveln was originally conceived as a radio drama, after all, so that structure makes perfect sense. As an adult, and reading in a foreign language, I was also particularly interested in seeing how Swedish has changed over time. This wasn’t limited to specific words or slang, which of course cropped up—norms of etiquette were also different. Our protagonists soon enlist the help of the village priest*, and they always refer to him in the third person when speaking directly to him (“Vill farbror ha….?”). I don’t think that would be the case today, and I was a bit surprised to see it in something as recent as this.

And even if the language sometimes felt a bit oversimplified to me, an adult reading this middle grade fantasy novel, Gripe (and her co-creator, Kay Pollak) didn’t shy away from asking their readers to reflect on some pretty heady material. The book opens right away with a meditation on coincidences and chance and destiny; then, as more about Emilie and Andreas’s love story unfolds, Annika and David dig into surprisingly nuanced thoughts about feminism and gender roles in the 1700s. In a summary like this, I realize that sounds like it would come off as a bit precocious and moralizing, but in the story their commentary sounds like any conversation I could have had with a friend when I was sixteen. These are not the insufferable teenagers of a John Green novel.

Cute, cozy, but not at all cloying. A nice bit of new nostalgia for me.

Postscript: I pressganged my sambo into watching the new SVT miniseries with me. Later we found a statement from Gripe about how she was worried that a TV adaptation would strip the story of all of its more thoughtful, philosophical elements. Turns out she was right. I’ll close with a quote  from Pastor Lindroth near the end of the book that will sit in my head for a long time:

Och när jag nu tänker närmare på saken här, så tycker jag nog att ingen kan ta på sitt ansvar att döma sin egen tid. Det kallar jag högmod…Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

*Maybe pastor? I’m not sure which is the right title for clergy in the Swedish church.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was the latest pick for the Swedish book club I’ve recently (if intermittently) started attending, and yet again they’ve opted for a translation into Swedish. (Previous entries include The Blind OwlThe World of YesterdayThe New York Trilogy.) No complaints from me, exactly, but I suppose that means I need to find other ways of keeping abreast of contemporary Swedish literature.

It’s getting on to Christmas in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland and protagonist Bill Furlong is working hard to get coal deliveries out and payments in to support his wife and five daughters. A delivery to a convent brings him into unusually close contact with behind-the-scenes matters at the local Magdalene laundry and (spoiler, I guess) the story ends with Furlong helping one of the girls escape.

Points for brevity and, despite the subject matter, not being an absolute morass of despair. I was expecting the conflict to revolve around one of Furlong’s own daughters being sent to the institution and spent most of the story trying to guess which one it would be. Maybe that was deliberate misdirection by Keegan, who’s to say? A lesser writer would have gone that direction, I’m sure, and I appreciate that she didn’t.

Otherwise, I imagine that a lot of the staying power a story like this has depends on the emotional resonance the setting has for a reader. I’m not Irish; I have no immediate connection to that particular tragedy. In the same vein, I expect a novel like Beloved hits different if you’re not American.

Brave New World

This was another book club pick, this time for a group that usually focuses on philosophy. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it, since this is a group I appreciate for filling in the gaps in my philosophy education rather than my literary reading, but Brave New World was also one of those Great Classics that had passed me by, the rare book that I remember giving up on, so I was still game.

Well, at least I finished it this time around. Some ninety years after publication and I struggle with understanding why it persists as a Great ClassicBrave New World suffers from the kind of aged-like-milk retrofuturism that consigns other science fiction to the dustbin of history; I’m feeling a bit punchy today so I’ll make the bold claim that Huxley’s continued commentary and sequels, as well as his overall literary reputation, probably helped Brave New World stick better in the public consciousness than your typical pulp magazine story. The novel starts with a load of technobabble infodumping at the hatchery that would have been right at home in an issue of Amazing Stories or Weird Tales, and my eyes glazed over as quickly as they had on my first attempt some twenty-odd years ago. Most of the satirical bits, such as the all the Ford jokes, have also lost their shine in the intervening years.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were the parts that Huxley didn’t spend that much time on: the psychic, psychological cost of the culture clashes, like between Linda and the Savage Reservation community, or John and the World State. They both suffer miserable fates, but that narrative fate  is the shallowest, laziest commentary Huxley could have possibly provided. Why, for example, is John so unmoored by his attraction to Lenina? Sure, the differences in the sexual norms they’re used to would naturally lead to misunderstandings or incompatibilities—John even articulates that when he rejects her point-blank offer, saying he wants to do or accomplish something to deserve her first. Sure, that’s understandable, even if it’s completely dismissive of what the woman in this situation thinks. But while the violent outburst that follows is a fairly realistic, if extreme, depiction of the mixed and unprocessed emotions a lot of (straight) men have about sex and the women they’re sexually attracted to, Huxley doesn’t really dig any deeper into John’s psychology than that. To a modern reader (or, to this modern reader), John’s reaction to Lenina isn’t anything spontaneous that would arise in nature: it’s one that’s a result of repressive ideas about sex and gender norms. But because Brave New World isn’t supposed to be a critique or a satire of the society John grew up in, it’s hard to argue that Huxley recognizes that. It sure seems like for Huxley the normal state of sexual relations is one where men must constantly strive and impress naturally disinterested, picky women.

The only character who gets any interesting psychological treatment is Bernard. His suffering and marginalization because of his outsider status don’t automatically turn him into a hero, which is too often the case in a lot of stories. Being slightly outside the order of things has given him something a moral standard, and a greater insight into (and cynicism about) the whole World State system, but when it comes to his actions Bernard is just as often a coward or a clout-chaser as he is an upstanding moral person. In a story full of cardboard cutouts, Bernard is the only actual person.

Brave New World is one of the most notorious of banned books, and as someone who ardently believes in not banning books, I feel a bit guilty about not liking it more. Should it be banned? Of course not. But not every banned book is worth reading, either.

The New York Trilogy

Here’s another left field book, a pick for a book club on Meetup. I’d never heard of The New York Trilogy before, or even Paul Auster. There’s a whole slew of literature from the 80s and 90s that were too new to be part of curricula but too old to be topical by the time I was reading Big Serious Grown-Up Book, and The New York Trilogy falls neatly into that category.

It’s unclear to me whether the now-accepted convention of publishing all three novels (novellas, really) as one collection is according to Auster’s own wishes or a publishing company decision, but I have to say I can’t imagine reading any one of these stories in isolation, or what it would have been like to read the first and then have to wait a year to read the next two. Not because the first story ends on a cliffhanger that gets resolved in the sequels, but because it must have felt incomplete. (Or maybe I’m only saying that because I only know it as one chapter in a larger book.)

The New York Trilogy consists of three novellas: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. All three have the same, or nearly the same, noir-adjacent plot point:* the protagonist is induced into tailing a mark for some shadowy purpose. In City of Glass it’s a mystery writer who is mistaken for a private investigator; in Ghosts it’s an actual private detective we only know as “Blue” who is paid to follow “Black” in a world with only colors for names; in The Locked Room a frustrated writer finds himself obligated to track down his missing-presumed-dead friend who has become a posthumous literary success, whose widow he has now married and whose son he is now raising.

*Paul Auster on LitHub: “… it was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels. They’re not that in the least.” Sorry, Paul.

Mistaken identities, self-referentiality, literary references, meditations on language and madness and identity permeate all three books. At the moment of writing I’m still waiting for my book club to meet to discuss it, but as it currently stands I’m not sure I got the point, or if there even was a point, but I still liked the ride.

Journey to Russia

If I had been a better planner, I would have made an effort to read a Croatian author or two before spending a week and a half in Zagreb. Instead, I hustled from one store to the other in search of English translations of Croatian. That’s one  way to spend a vacation, I suppose!

But in the end I triumphed. One of the books I came away with was Miroslav Krleža‘s essay collection Journey to Russia, translated by Will Firth. I will fully admit that even though I liked it, I might not have given the book the full attention it deserved. For one, I read a goodly portion of this book under the influence of a not insubstantial amount of beer. For another, midway through I became gripped by the fantastic ambition to finish it and mail it to a book friend before my flight home. It’s exactly the kind of thing they would love and it would be less weight for me to schlep around! Everybody wins! The only problem with this brilliant plan was that I no longer had their address saved on my phone, which I didn’t realize until I got to the last chapter. Oops.

Journey to Russia is an account of Krleža’s…journey to Russia…in the mid 1920s. What’s Communism going to be like? What’s the Soviet Union going to be like? Hard to say, but for Krleža it’s the future! His optimism in that matter is both endearing and sad—aged like milk, as the expression goes.  But there’s a lot in the collection that’s still a delight to read today. “Entering Moscow” is a fantastic reflection on the power of memory as well as an evocative depiction of a Moscow from another era. (I guess? Haven’t been to Moscow myself to compare…) Other moments came as a bit of a restorative balm, so to speak, with Krleža critiquing the racism of the capitalist imperialist project a full decade before Saint-Exupèry’s casual French disdain for Bedouins and “the Orient.” Krleža also has an eye for portraying characters with nuance and insight, for example his account of an awkward dinner party hosted by once-great but now dispossessed aristocrats with guests including a dimwitted German businessman, simple laborers, Party cadres, and Krleža himself.

I’m sure for someone more schooled in Soviet history or central European literature than me, Krleža’s commentary on contemporary theater and literature will carry vastly more meaning. It’s hard to appreciate dunking on Chekhov when I’ve never read anything by him. Same with unknown-to-me directors at different Moscow theaters. “Leninism on the Streets of Moscow,” meanwhile, made me question my own reading comprehension: at first blush it read to me like sarcastic criticism of the obsession with Lenin and its manifestation in assorted trinkets and gewgaws, but even at the time of writing Krleža was a fervent Leninist. The last chapter, a polemical on imperialism, is a bit hit and miss. Partially my fault (again: the beers), but pages and pages of calculations designed to support the inherent and inevitable triumph of socialism by the end of the century is a struggle even for sober readers. (Every time I re-read Walden, I skip the introductory “Economy” chapter. Sorry, Henry.) On the other hand, the criticisms of capitalism and the relationship between financial institutions and the state ring just as true today as in the 20s. Plus ça change…!

Firth’s translation is only from 2017 and is the first appearance of the text in English. It comes with an introduction from Dragana Obradović that puts the collection in context for English readers who aren’t necessarily familiar with Krleža (like yours truly).

Journey to Russia probably wasn’t the best introduction to Krleža, but it was what was at hand. I still liked it and I can see how I might better appreciate his fiction.

Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

I added Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style to my TBR after it was referenced in the generally underwhelming Refuse to be Done. That might have been the only worthwhile takeaway I had from that book—if I’m even remembering correctly, maybe I heard of it from somewhere else.

Artful Sentences is a fantastic compendium of, well, artful sentences. Each chapter focuses on a particular syntactic structure by opening with a brief introduction and explanation and then diving right into the examples. Tufte provides additional commentary throughout and, occasionally, brings up some examples that are less than artful for the sake of comparison.

This is not the kind of nonfiction book that everyone needs (“needs”) to read; the finer points of writing style are not in the general public’s interest in the same way that understanding the environment, racism, democracy, history, etc. are. But for book lovers and voracious readers, Artful Sentences is a fun investigation of what fuels great writing, and for writers and editorial professionals it is an absolutely indispensable reference. I borrowed a copy from Stockholm University’s library but by the end of the first chapter I knew that I would want my own private copy for reference.

Conflict is Not Abuse

While I was browsing Što čitaš? after I dropped off The House of the Dead, my gaze fell on Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sara Schulman. What a relevant and potentially controversial premise! Praise on the back from Claudia Rankine and bell hooks! The only problem is that it was a bit of a chonker; moreover, the original English edition was easily available at the Stockholm library. Really, it wouldn’t have killed me to wait. But I was impatient and wanted to leave the store with something, so I figured, why not? As it turns out, Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind was already on my TBR anyway. So it kind of counted, right?

Schulman’s thesis here is a bit complex. Her first argument is that the structure of private relationships, such as those in families or between lovers or friends, is the basis or model for the relationship between citizens and then state. Interpersonal and political conflicts are therefore analogous, or can at least be analyzed in similar terms. The second argument is that we often conflate “being uncomfortable” with “being in danger” (“overstating harm,” in her words) which leads to the claim Schulman makes right in the title of the book: many forms of “being uncomfortable” that are considered “being in danger” (whether by an abuser, the state, or a victim) should instead be thought of as either 1) literally Nothing (as in, one of the parties involved being triggered by something completely innocuous because of their own personal history), 2) Normative Conflict, or 3) Resistance. Overstating harm, Schulman argues, renders us unable to actually address the root of the issue. Her third argument is that the usual responses perpetuate more harm than whatever the inciting incident may have been.

With all of that established, Schulman then goes through four different approaches to conflict resolution that she believes provides a better alternative—historical psychoanalysis, Al-Anon, mindfulness, and pop psychology. A disparate group of frameworks, to be sure, but Schulman argues that all of them provide space for 1) pause and reflection in the moment (rather than immediate reactivity) as well as 2) accountability to a larger community. Throughout the book she illustrates her arguments with various case studies, from domestic violence and sexual assault to HIV disclosure laws in Canada to Israel’s occupation of Gaza, to demonstrate the various levels at which overstating harm and its consequences play out.

At this point, I will note that Schulman is not writing out of any particular academic discipline; her background is as a writer of literature, though also of nonfiction as well. She is up front about this and introduces the book and her argument as ideas she is offering up for consideration rather than a traditional academic examination (though she occasionally cites research and statistics when appropriate and includes a Works Cited section as well as citations by page).

Conflict is Not Abuse ended up being one of those books where the more I thought about it, the more mixed my feelings became. Schulman is very clear about her progressive bona fides right from the start because I think she’s perceptive enough to know that, at least from an unexamined surface level, her arguments are going to sound reactionary, or that she’s going to be excellent ideological cover for conservative talking points. (“Look at how this particular leftist is saying the same things about the left that we are!”) A quick Google leads to a glowing review from Heterodox Academy, for example, a group that I would feel safe saying is not in alignment with Schulman’s own values. It’s impossible to prevent that kind of reading or use of a text, however. The best you can do is what Schulman did: make it clear that you’re arguing from a specific position, in her case a queer leftist position including advocacy for people living with HIV and AIDS.

But there were other things that didn’t land well even when situated in that biographical context, with Schulman telling on herself in different ways. The first section, for example, could have well been titled Someone Had A Fight With Sarah Schulman Over Email Once And She Never Forgot. (The vibe was very similar to Bellwether in that vein: “A brash young person once asked Connie Willis to put out her cigarette in the 90s and she decided to write a whole book about it.”) As she sees it, emails and other forms of textual communication are the bane of all interpersonal conflicts today. Telephone calls and in-person conversations, meanwhile, are pure and holy and have never led to a single misunderstanding. This struck me strange as I was reading it, considering that Schulman foregrounds everything with her career as a writer and novelist—how could a professional and successful writer really believe that the written language is somehow insufficient and lacking in nuance? It only became stranger once I came to the section with her proposal for conflict resolution, the foundation of which is delay and reflection: taking a moment to choose words and reactions carefully. Isn’t that one of the advantages of written communication? That we can take all the time we need to say exactly what we want to say and to be able to revise it accordingly? That it can occur, if necessary, asynchronously? But then you realize: Schulman was 58 when Conflict is Not Abuse came out in 2016. Ah hah, Boomers and their predilection for phone calls.

Schulman also punctuates the book with personal anecdotes, both from her own life and those of people she knows. They soon begin to take on a sort of Goofus and Gallant tone, as Schulman always presents herself as an aspirational model of conflict resolution, whereas it’s always other people who escalate things unnecessarily. I understand not wanting to put your own painful or embarrassing mistakes out there for public consumption in a book for all eternity, but you can at least dial it back from being the Sarah Schulman Show and let other people be shining exemplars of conflict resolution. I think talking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine is important, but reproducing your Facebook posts and comments on it for pages and pages is the book equivalent of telling someone about this weird dream you had at length: it’s an exercise in self-absorption that is only interesting to you.

More seriously than just Schulman telling on herself, however, is a key point her larger argument. She (rightly) argues that people almost always have a reason and a motivation for doing what they do, even when the things they do are horrible. But then she pivots on that and argues that sometimes it’s not the person themselves but an outside observer who has the best insight into that reason. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this thesis seems largely uncontroversial to her because of her stated admiration for psychotherapy and psychotherapists; that she has a sort of paradigm where “good friends” (to use her words) are like gifted therapists who know what their friends’ problems are before their friends realize it themselves. That unexamined argument is where the book (partially) falls apart for me, because that’s the backdoor by which you can smuggle in all kinds of toxic nonsense. “You’re not trans, you’re just a tomboy.” “You’re not gay, you’re just brainwashed.” “I know you want it.” This single belief is the pernicious assertion that undergirds everything else toxic in this book.

To that end, someone should have been a good friend (or a good editor) to Schulman and told her: hey, you’re not coming across as your best self here. I don’t think it’s good or necessary to include these anecdotes. Here, I found some experts in these topics you’re covering, would you like them to review your material and talk to you about it? Schulman picked a sticky wicket to tackle, but in the end I don’t think she was quite equipped for it.

 

The House of the Dead

As a rule I generally pack light for my vacations, but this is always in favor of bringing too many books. The prospect of long hours of travel always inspires me to bring a selection, so that if my mood or attention span should shift, I’m more likely to have something suitable on hand. Plus there’s just the fact that I never want to feel like I “only” have one thing to read. Yes, there is Kindle (or the Kindle app, in my case) but sometimes phone battery is at a premium. Inevitably, then, I travel with at least two or three paperbacks, ideally ones without sentimental value so I can leave them behind (to make room for new books). Only sometimes, against my better judgment, do I bring library books or hardbacks that I was desperate to finish at that particular moment.

Nor can these books be just any random unread book off the shelf, either. A mysterious quality guides my hand, the “vibes” if you will. This is how I choose most things, actually—I have to bask in the collective presence of the options and contemplate them until one suddenly just feels right. The decision cannot be rushed or rationalized. Ice cream parlors with miles and miles of flavors were agony for me as a child (and no doubt for the parent accompanying me).

All of that preamble is to say that I can’t for the life of me explain why I chucked Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead into my bag beyond “the vibes.” Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite books out of my entire high school English career and afterwards I set about acquiring, but never actually reading, other works by Dostoyevsky. The next book of his that I read to completion was The Idiot last January—some twenty years later, in other words.

Where I struggled with The Idiot, I deeply enjoyed The House of the Dead. The character studies are more penetrating, more engaging, more revealing. The back of my Dover Thrift edition (ah, yes, Constance Garnett, my old friend!) describes the book as a “semi-autobiographical memoir,” which I take to mean as more or less true. The introduction purporting to be “oh look at these notes I just happened to find among a dead man’s papers” seems to be the plausible deniability cover-your-ass gloss of fiction over the rest of what’s to come.

The various prison personalities are interesting enough that you can overlook the lack of overarching plot or conflict. The narrator relates various observations that roughly correspond to a year, from winter to summer to winter again. Not really a strict chronological year, as such; it’s maybe akin to a thematic grouping, with several summers or winters collapsed into one, with a substantial chunk of time elided: Dostoyevsky himself served four years at a prison camp, and the self-insert narrator (Alexandr Petrovich) claims to have served ten. Petrovich acknowledges this gap and explains that he was the most observant and inquisitive during his first few months at the prison, so those memories are the strongest.

Since The House of the Dead is set in a Siberian prison camp, certain comparisons spring to mind. Not only Solzhenitsyn and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—the portraits of the various inmates reminded me a lot of Homeboy. Enough that I might send my Homeboy book buddy a copy of The House of the Dead. Preferably a newer translation than Garnett’s, though. Several have been put out since then, including Pevear & Volokhonsky! My own copy is now residing on the shelves of Što čitaš? in Zagreb, where it will hopefully find a second life.