"Notes from Underground" and "The Manhattan Alien Abduction"

Not a review of either: I don't write reviews.

I’ve been listening to Notes from Underground on Audible¹ for the last few months. I keep starting and restarting because I feel like I’m missing something, which I am. I am missing the text itself. The actual book.

And maybe because I’ve listened to the first several chapters so many times, I’m starting to get annoyed by the artifice of the narrative voice. The theatricality of it all, the absurdity and immense wisdom of the protagonist’s observations and theories feel annoyingly familiar, and yet even more absurd and wise, always better than I remember them each time.

Dear Dostoevsky, I’m feeling oppressed by your novella. I’m waiting for a plot-focused story to emerge and save me from the narrator’s constant complaints and beautifully carved condemnations. It’s making me sick at this point. And yet, I can’t get past the first few chapters. I must like feeling sick. Maybe because it forces me to look at my impatience, my envy, and my shame. Your writing makes me feel intellectually lazy. (I live in LA, so I think about that kind of laziness a lot.) Every other line is a line I would have wanted to steal and use to write a short story ten years ago.

I am forty now, and forty years-why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral! Now answer me, sincerely, honestly, who lives past forty? I'll tell you who does: fools and scoundrels. I will say this right to the face of all those venerable old men, all those silver-haired, sweet-smelling old men! I have a right to say it, because I will live to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! . . . Wait, let me catch my breath. . .

N.B. I’m 43.

Maybe the listening and re-listening, getting stuck and starting over again and again, has become compulsive. Or maybe the opening chapters have been acting on me like a drug or a medication that takes time to build up in your system before you begin to feel the effects of it. (The un-fun kind of drug.)

(This next part ties into my approach to “reading” Notes from Underground. It’s also connected to my chronic constipation, though I’m not ready to go into that just yet. Long story short, I guess, I have trouble letting things flow through me. I get blocked, and stuff…repeats and…collects…)