Elif Batuman – The Idiot

I bought Elif Batuman’s The Idiot because I wanted to read a contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which I suppose makes me the idiot on this particular occasion, since the connection to Dostoevsky is tenuous. Instead, it’s a novel about a naïve student on her first year at Harvard who falls in love and spends the summer in Hungary. It’s a novel with ideas, if not quite a novel of ideas. Selin, the protagonist, studies things like linguistics and the philosophy of language, and reads books like The Magic Mountain, and has an opinion on Dostoevsky. However, on the level of language this is more akin to Sally Rooney than Mann or the Russian. It’s all light and easy sentences, dialogue smooth as someone letting a slinky slide between two outstretched arms, and disorganised observations of things in rooms. It’s real in the way reality TV is real – it is existence absent of any redeeming light.

One of the criticisms I might make of it is that so much of its four hundred, easy-to-read pages, feels meaningless. The things caught in our narrator’s gaze often have neither narrative nor thematic relevance; their purpose is to make reality feel real, but often they don’t even seem to do that. The interactions between characters are regularly similarly lightweight. Yet the novel as a whole might make for itself the defence that it is actually serious about meaning, that such scenes are essential to its construction, that I am the one misunderstanding it. For indeed, being a work about language, love, and communication, it tries to treat seriously the shifting presence and absence of meaning in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps. The fact that I sit here writing this suggests maybe it’s a case worth making.

The Idiot begins in 1995 with Turkish-American Selin arriving at Harvard to begin her undergraduate studies. She meets her roommates and her classmates. She majors in linguistics and studies things in the philosophy and psychology of language. She volunteers a little of her time to teach maths and English as a second language, largely without success. She goes to the odd party but barely drinks and certainly does nothing sexual. There are many characters who drift in and out, largely undifferentiated, but there are two that are important – Ivan, an older Hungarian man Selin meets during Russian class, and Svetlana, a Serbian girl from the same class. Ivan provides a kind of love interest for Selin, while Svetlana is a kind of worldly motherly figure for her. In the summer break Selin goes to Paris with Svetlana, and from there on to Hungary, where she is to teach English to some Hungarian village children.

It makes sense to start with language, since these are the ideas that underpin the novel as a whole. With her linguistics studies, Selin tries to make sense of language itself by considering how language could be explained to Martians, or by them to us. “Supposing we went to Mars and the Martians said “gavagai” every time a rabbit ran by”, it would not be possible to know whether this referred to running, or rabbits, or something else entirely. Selin finds this depressing, as this early introduction to communication seems to suggest we cannot communicate, that meaning is trapped inside of us, never to get out. Naturally, this is an introductory class, so the fact that Selin can’t get anywhere towards solving this problem is one of those examples where a text seems to provide a problem that contains the seeds of its own later dissolution. (She should keep studying as it’s obvious she does not have the full picture yet).

The novel also challenges this “communication doesn’t work” idea through a short story for Russian learners whose chapters are scattered throughout its pages. This tells of a girl called Nina who goes to Siberia after the man she loves disappears, but one of its quirks is that the text is simplified to focus on the grammatical structures the learners are currently focusing on, such as a particular grammatical case. While the story contains plenty of miscommunications, the fact that a coherent narrative can be produced even with such obvious linguistic limitations rather suggests that it is people who are failing to communicate, rather than language itself. In other words, meaning’s general transferability is not precluded by language. Rather, it is people who are the problem. I found this a little unsatisfying – The Idiot introduces a problem only to deny it is one.

This sense that people are the problem is one we might have picked up on from the novel’s title, of course. Selin is naïve – in this she has something in common with Prince Myshkin. Since she is naïve and innocent she struggles with the articulation of her own emotions towards Ivan, turning from speech to lengthy emails that might work if they were not themselves, inevitably, an exercise in avoiding communication – they talk indirectly, and so do not reach the destination:

“Dear Selin, would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon?  Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?”

The above is one of Ivan’s, though Selin’s are no better. At times they also use Russian, a language neither of them knows well, which naturally enough does not help either. These are two people failing language. This is a point stressed when Selin is in rural Hungary teaching English, and trying and failing to fight a local fellow-teacher who insists one pronouncing all the silent vowels in English. “One”, becoming “oh-neh”, for example. Selin herself does not really seem to realise that teaching requires effort on her part, so while she is critical of her co-teacher she gets nowhere with her own students – “Papel iss blonk”, one of them says, for “the paper is white”. Failure, but human failure, everywhere.

These failures mean that Ivan and Selin do not connect in the way they should, or could, and create joint meanings together. They leave things unsaid, or said in a distorted manner. In this they are like teenagers, however, rather than people seriously struggling with a higher-order problem about the possibility of meaning transference. We might say that Batuman wants to make a point about culture here, and its relationship to this connection-building among people. Hungary and America (or Turkey) are different! Look, Ivan hasn’t read Walden. Again, the text raises this potential problem only to refute itself. The Hungarians and Turks can bond, we are told, over the shared indignities of the collapse of empire – “Trianon! Touché!” one of the Hungarians says. Even the legendarily strange Hungarian language is demystified by Batuman stressing the similarities and loanwords common to it and Turkish.

It is perhaps wrong to disparage a book called The Idiot for having an idiot at its centre or suggesting that the ideas she encounters are really less important than her own failures. (Would this not mean that writing a novel called “A bad book” would always be good, unless it were excellent?) Yet it’s wrong to dismiss how corrosive the idea of human failure can be when it becomes central. A lot of Russian novels – and Batuman loves Russian novels enough to have written a whole book on them – centre on the gap between the idea and the reality of human practices. Raskolnikov’s theory of murder, and the reality of a bloodied axe, for example. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this and what The Idiot does. Raskolnikov or Bazarov discover that human failings cause issues for their philosophies. Selin has no philosophy to be challenged, so ideas cannot be central to the work, no matter what other reviewers on the cover might say.

Perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the ideas and their potential for realisation. Communication is possible. Sometimes it’s hard, but that’s allowed. The theories on it are developed and probably, to a certain extent, the result of real thought and experimentation. Utopias, as far as we can make out, are not possible. The ideas fail because they imagine an incorrect view of human nature. Communication eludes Selin not because the theories are wrong, but because she is naïve, childish, and doesn’t really put any effort in. One approach becomes universal because it’s about all of our failings, while the other is about an individual’s failings which she will probably sort out once she has grown up a little.  

I have gone quite far from what I actually thought is the most interesting thing in this book – its use of section breaks. While Ivan and Selin’s not-relationship is the central story of the book, the bulk of it is taken up with Selin’s day-to-day experiences of being a new student in a big university. When I was about sixteen and thought I could teach myself writing through an entirely formulaic approach, I read in various places that my sections could never be shorter than 1’500 words and should always include some kind of conflict. This number has stuck with me even as it has never helped me much with my own writing. With The Idiot, Batuman doesn’t follow this rule either. Many of its sections are impressionistic and under a page in length. They accumulate, creating a sense of Selin’s experience of Harvard. They are snatches of conversations, or things spotted from a window. They are not, really, meaningful – even within a mesh of novelistic themes and meanings. But they are the brocade out of which the novel as a whole is built.

What is mildly interesting here is the way that Batuman builds meaning into this use of length and brevity. On the one hand, this is most obvious in the way that once the not-romance gets going, the sections with Ivan are considerably longer than the sections without him. It’s a quite direct way of putting the disorganised meaninglessness of the earlier sections into perspective by showing the paucity of their development quite literally on the page. On the other, and more thematically curious, is the way that this relates to Selin’s friendship with Svetlana. There is a moment when Svetlana reveals that she used to be bulimic and the narrative cannot contend with this fact, so the section just ends. It’s not presented as something deeply revealing from Svetlana within context, but Selin’s lack of reaction is another indication about the meaning-problem of the novel. Selin is yet again too immature, too naïve, to appreciate what her friend has told her. It’s not relevant to her own story.

If there’s something close to an epiphany to cap The Idiot, it’s the discovery by Selin that she is not the centre of the world, only of her world. This little bulimia mention is one example, as are the countless new people that she meets in Hungary: “I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.”

I can be charitable and say that the novel begins with a meaningless mass of impressions, grows more formally clear at its centre with Ivan, then ends up with a return to those same disconnected impressions. Only this time, Selin has a new consciousness of what they mean through her slightly-increased maturity. She has a sense that even if they are disconnected and non-narrativised to herself, they may be formed and clear in others’ worlds. Indeed, perhaps that’s one hidden message of all the teaching in the novel – that a teacher, like Selin herself, can have an impact on her students far greater than she herself would ever know.

Anyway, it was a reasonably funny, easy-to-read, work of contemporary fiction. Now I can go back to the dead.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fall” – a modern “Lady with the Dog”

After the big braying dogs of the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s a curious turnaround that some of the most important people writing in Russian in recent years are women – Maria Stepanova, Tatyana Tolstaya, Ludmilla Ulitskaya, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. With the exception of Stepanova, who is from the generation after the other three, they came to creative maturity as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a fact without which much of their work would have been unpublishable, and are now in their seventies and eighties, living in self-imposed exiles. A blog post on Ulitskaya’s Big Green Tent may one day appear here. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, so much as that I didn’t love it. Long, meandering, it had something of Pynchon in its encyclopaedic portrayal of Soviet dissidents, but shared the American writer’s lack of warmth. Today, I am taking a different approach. Through a close analysis of a single four-page story by Ludmilla Petrushevskya, I’d like to make the case for her own brilliance.

Nothing Petrushevskaya has written has been very long. The three works collected in There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In (not Petrushevskaya’s title, nor those of the other Penguin editions of her work in English, as far as I can make out) are at the lower bound of a novella in length. Her more typical mode is the very short story. Not quite flash fiction, these are still only a few pages long. If you seek a modern Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, at least in form, you will be disappointed. Yet that is perhaps the only ground for disappointment, for these stories are innovative, especially in their narration, and far truer to my experience of the majority of Russian lives today than any ballroom or hunt from War and Peace.

Quotations from the story come from the translation by Anna Summers, found in There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. The quotes at the end come translated via The Moscow Times.

“The Fall” is a love story, told from the sidelines. “That summer we watched a transformation by the sea. We were staying across the street from a resort for workers; she was one of the guests. We couldn’t ignore her – she was too vulgar.” This beginning is shocking not through what it says, but how it says it. Immediately we have a narrative voice that wishes not one bit to settle into a kind of easy anonymity like a grand 19th century doyen – it wants to judge, and crush with that judgement. Even without the word “vulgar” there’s this persistent “we”, which begins three out of the first four sentences of the story. It seems to say that we don’t have a narrator, so much as an unquestionable judgement from the very voice of polite society.

Against this society, we have a woman, who is given by it the name of Carmen. “Just imagine her: a tight perm, plucked eyebrows, gaudy lipstick, a miniskirt”. Note the command to imagine – the narrator doesn’t just want to judge, they want to force readers into adopting their perspective – to picture the scene so that they can judge the same way. Carmen herself seems to be looking for love. Between the chops of the narrator as they try to destroy any worth that plan may have – “she strained, pathetically”, “a little womanly happiness (as imagined in soap operas)” – we understand that much about Carmen’s intentions.

Carmen has several admirers, from “a tall one in a heavy wool suit”, to “a skinny youth with hippie locks”. To the narrator, they are like animals – the word “pack” is used twice for them. By the next paragraph, “Number One”, the man in the suit, has come out on top. “Carmen and Number One walk about with dignity: she’s curbed her laughing; he carries her purse.”

“Dignity”? The narrator has shifted their tone from the total dismissal of the first page. The first sign of this comes a little earlier, when describing her laugh: “our Carmen laughs shrilly, but not as shrilly or loudly as one would expect – her laugh is not the war cry of some neighbourhood whore who invites all and sundry to her table; this Carmen laughs softly.” As a reader you can almost hear the frustration in the narrative voice – that “but not” that shows they would like to be meaner but cannot justify it, that reference to a “neighbourhood whore” so as to tar Carmen by association within the sentence, even if the narrator cannot call her such outright.

The next paragraph sees the two of them on a bus. Phrases like “those atrocious heels” let us know that Carmen is still in trouble, even if other remarks, like how “Number One gazes abstractly over everyone’s heads, looking out for his little lady”, suggest a seriousness to the couple and their “love” that the dismissive narrator, in their cruelty, lacks. “The biggest misery of all – a doomed love” – that’s the narrator’s assessment. But coming from such a meanie, whose only goal seems the tearing-down of others, this love, however doomed, shines like a light in the narration. Carmen, as a name, may refer to a fictional character, but she seems considerably more real and authentic than the woman staying in the hotel across the road.

The result of love, as it should be, is transfiguration: “Carmen has mellowed and acquired a golden sheen. Her ridiculous curls have loosened up and lightened in the sun”. The judgement “ridiculous” is replaced by the neutral statement that the curls have loosened up. The narrator changes tack, from dismissing her as crass to a kind of crushing, dismissive, fake pity that is even nastier. They are “trying to dance” as “a few days remain” before their “eternal separation.”

In the final paragraphs the time has slipped forward as “The new season has begun.” What happened cannot matter. Their love, like everything in this world, is washed away as a new wave of guests rolls in. The two of them have gone “back to their children and spouses”, and all that remains is a “long-distance call in a phone booth at the post office.” In the end, “They’ll shout and cry across thousands of miles, deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned.” What a pessimistic ending! But note, though, the tense – we are now in the future. The narrator’s knowledge of other people has already been undermined by the time we get here – so why trust her suggestion of what the couple will do? There’s no need. In this shift to the future, there is a small gap for readerly agency – we can find hope where the narrator does not. But that is all we can do.

“The Fall” is Petrushevskaya at her best. It’s a story where the hard work is not in the language or images directly so much as in what lies behind it – the narrator and their voice. The narrator here is unreliable, but not in the sense of someone who conceals the truth. Instead, their prejudices distract them from it, so that they struggle to see the value of the love of poor Carmen. By seeing their petty prejudices, and following their interaction with what we take to be the reality underneath – a fairly average Black Sea romance – readers are led to see their own prejudices and how they might obscure their view of the world. At the same time, like a good character, the narrator is themself changing as they narrates – we hear their surprise at Carmen’s relationship, and there’s a certain commendable honesty in the way they belittles her without calling her something she is not, such as a whore.

It’s hard to read “The Fall” without also thinking about how it fits into the wider Russian literary tradition, because for one the comparison with Chekhov’s Lady with the Little Dog is so obvious. Both are Black Sea adultery tales, after all. Yet the texts are very different, despite their setting. Chekhov’s tale has a neutral, unobtrusive narrator. Instead, its focus is on Gurov, a serial adulterer who discovers that he is capable of true love after all. After the initial romance in Crimea, instead of just “long-distance call[s]”, Gurov actually follows Anna to her hometown to see her, and after that “the most difficult and complicated part” of their affair begins. As for Carmen, perhaps the same may happen with her too – as I noted, we don’t know. But what both works implicitly aim to do, is show the transfiguring power of love. Carmen becomes beautiful, and Gurov becomes good.

Love, though in adultery – it’s a little scandalous, even today. Neither narrator judges the relationship, only the romance. This stands in contrast to another great Russian work on adultery, Anna Karenina, which Lady with the Little Dog responds to. With the epigraph “vengeance is mine, I will repay”, Tolstoy is quite willing to be explicit about adultery’s evils when the other writers are not.  Out of the topic he wrote a huge novel, contrasting adultery to the good love of Kitty and Levin. Chekhov reacted to this by writing something much smaller. Adultery, he seems to say, is a thing to consider based on the specific case, rather than some abstract moral scheme. Gurov was leading a bad life before he met Anna, yet somehow this final adultery finally freed him from much in his life that was evil. Life is strange, but that’s why it’s wonderful. 

In “The Fall,” the narrator is like a representation of the forces of society in Tolstoy that ultimately drive Anna to her death, a figure judging and condemning. Yet just as Tolstoy himself couldn’t help but create in Anna a creature of vitality and excitement that readers have come to love, here too the narrator in “The Fall” has to admit the validity of the human as opposed to the ease of the casual condemnation. The dignity of Carmen and Number One is not just a thing they have, it is also a thing that the narrator, begrudgingly, grants them – they are in love, however doomed, and that makes them sparkle.

Like Chekhov, Petrushevskaya writes about the little folk. In that, her stories remind me much more of the Russia I knew than do those of any other writer. The dirt and grime and flaking wallpaper of a communal apartment I visited with a friend, the cramped kitchen of my ex-girlfriend’s family, with the same oily soups swapping pans day-in, day-out – such scenes Petrushevskaya brings to life. To them she adds, lit with a painful light, characters and events that I was lucky enough to mostly miss – endless stories of alcoholism, murder, and domestic violence. Chekhov is easy to read – he redeems the pathetic and largely innocent; Petrushevskaya is harder because the people she tries to redeem are often so obviously horrible even as she tries to save them.

The full extent of this badness is something she herself discovered to her horror only recently. In July 2023, she publicly announced she had given up writing, perhaps for good: “I’ve always written about my people. About the people who live in Russia. I felt sorry for them, the drunks and wretches… But now I don’t feel sorry for my people — invaders, thieves and rapists, murderers of children and destroyers of other people’s lives — or their hateful families, their wives and mothers… I will never write about them or for them.”

What are you supposed to do as a writer of a people who no longer seem worthy of redemption? If an author herself seems to turn on her work, should we still read it? If we spend our time looking through grime for chinks of light, that might make for good fiction, but isn’t it itself a bit hypocritical? Shouldn’t we instead get the damp cloth that will wipe the grime away?

I’ve been turning Petrushevskaya’s words over in my mind for months, and though I admire her stance, I think we should continue reading her stories and engaging with her characters. These stories are windows to a world – both through the flawed narrators, and through the grim narration – that exists. Without understanding it, with its prejudice and its meanness (in both senses, for after all these stories are unglamourously short compared to the great works of the 19th century), there is no way that the cycles of violence and trauma that characterise Russian life so strikingly can ever be stopped. Here in Petrushevskaya, there’s no wish fulfilment here for me to enjoy, but there is an overwhelming sense of seriousness. That, with fiction, is important too.

If you want to get started with Petrushevskaya, among the English language collections available, I’d say the collection this story comes from is the best – There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In is good too, but a little less approachable. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby I did not enjoy as much, but perhaps I’ll revisit it later.

Seven Years of Mostly About Stories

I have invested, perhaps foolishly, in a few friends’ startups, and my reward so far has been a few years’ worth of monthly updates that tell me that things are happening and people are working. Even if I don’t receive any money back, I still enjoy this sense of a joint journey, of being carried by the same wave. You, reader, are also an investor, albeit with your time rather than money, in me and what I make here, and to you I owe an update too. It doesn’t quite sit right with me to have a blog, which is inevitably personal in outlook and even features the first person singular pronoun at regular points, and yet to exist so shadily. One never knows, of course, whether you want me to exist as an independent entity, but I have my hopes on that score.

Indeed, I take as a vague principle that if you readers want properly academic writing, you head to Jstor, and that if you want the polished impersonality of a modern essay or review, you go to the New Yorker or LARB. In short, that if you are here, reading this, rather than merely stumbling on something on the internet while desperately trying to put together an essay for your studies, you must, in a certain sense, want this personal element, in other words, me. 

Life

Last year, I was entering the final stretch of a trainee programme at a large company and had moved to Germany. Over the course of last year, I finished this scheme and received a full-time position, also in Germany. This was a far from guaranteed outcome, and the high levels of stress associated with searching for a role in an unfriendly job market had a negative impact both on my reading and on my writing. All that is now behind us. The new work contract is permanent, and I have the full force of German unions and worker protections at my back to ensure any future moves will be entirely voluntary.

I have spoken before about my enjoyment of stability, indeed my great need for it. After my unplanned exit from Russia in early 2022, I have more or less lived without even a year’s certainty ahead of me. I am not a person who savours spontaneity or the absence of structure. “Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be fierce and original in your works.” This quote of Flaubert’s is one I have always admired whenever I have seen it, and I can say that it has proven true for my own case too.

And what stability! My work contract is permanent. My rental contract, in a spacious and well-located flat, is equally permanent. Never before has the future been so secure, even if the new risks of stasis and stagnation have appeared for the first time on the horizon. This is a great blessing.

Writing

I finished a first draft of a reasonably lengthy novella and was pleased enough with it, an unusual thing, to show it to a few friends in exchange for some helpful feedback. During the dark days of the job hunt and the brighter-but-still-stressful days of the apartment and furniture hunt, I did not succeed in writing creatively. I was, however, last year blessed with ideas for two novels of, I think, great potential. Unfortunately, one is historical in nature and requires a condition of personal leisure that is currently unavailable to me. The other novel is already in progress.

Now that I have this external stability mentioned above alongside an excellent work-life-balance, there is neither any practical obstacle nor reasonable excuse available to me not to focus with redoubled efforts upon my ambitions of becoming a great, or at least reasonably good, fiction writer. I see this as consisting of three elements.

First, I must improve my experience. This I can do simply by living and paying attention. In a favourite phrase, it means keeping both eyes open and noting things down. Observations, images, snatches of phrases. One of my tasks for this year is to do this in a dedicated volume, as my diary is primarily an emotion-regulation tool now and hence no longer the best place for such things. I am not fundamentally concerned about my chances in this development area: I have had a reasonable number of interesting experiences to call upon already – in Russia, growing up in Scotland, and elsewhere. What I must do now is become the kind of noticer that can identify and place the perfect detail to turn mere remembered experience into a rich vividness.

Second, I must improve my background knowledge. Mostly About Stories is, I hope, a storehouse of at least some value in this regard, but the fact remains that there are significant areas where my knowledge is, in my view, insufficient. Reading – history, philosophy, criticism, art history, politics, economics, religion, current affairs – and so on, in conjunction with discussions, where possible, with those who know better, should answer this need. While I have a reasonable amount of free time outside of work, I cannot afford the truly scattergun approach of a writer of leisure. Therefore, this reading does need to be somewhat targeted. Learning is a project, and projects can be managed.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I must improve my technique. Many, many, writerly sins can be forgiven of people who know how to put together an incisive sentence in a style that is their own. Can’t do dialogue? Then give us the descriptive jewels of a Marquez paragraph, the chaotic mess of a Krasznahorkai, the hilarious brutality of Bernhard or the wondrous rhythms of Fosse.

Improving one’s technique is, of course, a matter of practice. It is also a matter of study. On this blog I have, I hope, provided the occasional example of the analysis of a wider work. Sometimes I even quote things, as if to inform readers that I have actually read the thing I’m talking about. But really, I am not attacking sentences enough. Increasingly, I contemplate doing blog posts on single paragraphs to really get to the heart of why they work. All this is necessary because while I am often pleased with what I write in my blog posts – there’s often a good sentence here or there, if I may say so myself – with my fiction this is almost never the case. Such focused study, getting closer to language itself, ought to remedy this. The late William Gass did this at times in his essays (e.g. “The Sentence Seeks its Form”), and I have great respect for such an approach.

These three areas are by and large how I think I can improve independently. Naturally, the criticism of trusted and untrusted persons on things I have written is also important, perhaps essential. But by and large, owing to my external situation, my focus is on personal development as it lies within my own hands. I am now 28 years old – a reality that at times strikes me as disappointing, but which is not objectively a catastrophe. I still view myself as being very much a journeyman or apprentice when it comes to writing. This is likely why I am so interested in style and technique. I view writing as a craft that I must work at before I can go around throwing pieces of paper in other people’s faces. Or rather, I want to say things, but I have enough respect for writing and readers to want to make sure I can say them well first.

Blog

Mostly About Stories, of course, has continued. I hope you have enjoyed some of the pieces. I know, and it pains me, that the quality can be variable. There’s always a tension here between my desire to give you something short, snappy, and polished, and my desire to note down in moderately organised paragraphs everything I possibly can about a book while still keeping the time I spend working on the posts reasonably under control. Since I read and write my posts primarily to learn, (and hope readers learn while reading as well), my natural tendency is always for a big baggy monster of a post. Occasionally, I do make unspoken resolutions for you to myself never to write anything longer than 1500, or 2000, or 2500 words. So far, this has not worked.

I have not posted as often as I had intended, annoyingly. I actually have a few posts stacked up which I just haven’t gotten around yet to posting, so it’s not even a dearth of reading or writing at my end which is to blame. I want, ideally, to put something out each fortnight. I do also, though I’ve said it’s unlikely, want to post things that are slightly more tightly written – though first it will be necessary to get through the backlog.

Numbers

When I started MAS, I looked around to see whether there was any information on how many viewers blogs like this actually get. There is a site that does a survey, linked here. Since I write about literature, an even less popular topic than books and reading in general, I still feel there’s value and interest in sharing my own specifically.

Anyway, last year’s total views was 103’546. As our first six-figure result this feels like a small milestone, even if it may just be the power of an accumulation of mildly interesting posts. While the majority of readers may well be people looking to write school and university essays about books they haven’t read, I am grateful for those among you who write comments that often make me feel you have read the book far better than I have, or who write me encouraging messages via the Contact form. And if you are just here to read and enjoy in silence, know that I’m grateful for your presence here too. It’s what I’d do myself.

Books

I would say that my greatest discovery this year has been the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. I had the impression that my post on The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea generated a lot of thoughts in readers – even the few friends who read the blog in real life mentioned it specifically when we caught up. I also enjoyed reflecting on Latronico’s Perfection, albeit slightly more than I enjoyed reading it.

Among the various things I read but did not write about, I received the greatest joy from Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty, about the relationship between ideas, life, and writing in the 19th century Russian novel, with a few forays into the Soviet period too. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves Russian literature and wants to know the historical interlinkages a little better, or perhaps just wants some new arguments to help articulate what possibly makes the literature special, if special it is.

Next

This year, I aim to write a first draft of the second of the novel ideas that came to me last year, the one that does not require months in a library. It is, however, at least in one sense, a novel of ideas. Hence, it does require plenty of reading – Camus, Sartre & de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, the Stoics, and the Christian Mystics, are all on my reading list and may appear here (in some cases again) later on. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m also going to read Dostoevsky again, for the first time since the 2022 Invasion. He’s necessary for the novel too.

I also aim to write slightly better blog posts and be mildly more consistent in posting them.

In general, I am excited for what discoveries lie ahead and for sharing them here, with you.