Reading Death Pact

DDDP - Day 48, pgs. 459-678 FINIS

2007-12-18T20:01:48+00:00

Well, that took longer than I expected. I only averaged 15.29 pages/day given my occasional brief hiatuses. Hiati? Breaks.

So.

During a mild griping session about Demons recently, I was gently reminded that a novel is not a film. This remark, while somewhat insulting (literary criticism majors... what else could one expect?), is nevertheless true and criticism of Demons must be relevant to the idiom. However, basic tenets of storytelling have applied since at least Aristotle's time and never mind that there are scores of people who've built academic and artistic careers around flaunting every one of these rules.

But was Dostoevsky's aim with Demons to be a storyteller? In short, did he intend to entertain? I can't think that he did, at least in the overall sense. Portions of the book are, in fact, entertaining. I quite enjoyed the Pyotr Stepanovich character's manipulations, rabble-rousing and general skulduggery. The high school age kids in the political club made me laugh a couple of times with their rhetoric and head-butting. Fedka the Convict was well-written and perhaps the most distinctive character of them all. The latter portion of Book III is actually paced quite briskly and the scenes of mayhem are vivid and engaging. I found Kirillov's suicide, and the scene immediately preceeding, quite riveting.

The characters feel flat because they aren't characters; they're Dostoevsky's embodiment of various ideas he wishes to explore. This can work, if the ideas are themselves interesting. But here is the great flaw in the novel: they aren't. What we're given are caricatures of extremist (and, in the case of Pyotr Stepanovich, entirely hypocritical) thought. Extremism tends to parody itself, of course, so perhaps Fyodor can't be entirely blamed for that. But one of my cardinal rules of fiction is that that which is true is not automatically interesting, hence the craft required to produce a novel/film/poem/etc. which really grabs an audience.

The ideas are uninteresting because they're facile and clichéd. I'm saying this with the benefit (or detriment, I suppose) of exposure to over 140 years of post-Demons writing in which many of these same themes and ideas have been explored, so I am, of course, both jaded and biased. But what really galls me is that Dostoevsky knew people like those he skewers here. He was part of leftist political groups. He was sent to Siberia for political crimes! And while he succeeds admirably in poking fun at and satirizing his former comrades his desire to point out the evil of their ideas devolves them all into shadow puppets. Why couldn't we have an honest look at real people who maybe believe certain things along these lines? Why couldn't we live with them and discover why they felt this way, how they can be easily corrupted by power-seeking megalomaniacs? No, instead, let's have a ponderous thesis on how the abandonment of God creates misery.

Another stumbling block is nothing lesser or greater than time itself. Dostoevsky spends a huge amount of Demons parodizing the works of his contemporaries and even with all the footnotes the value of this is simply lost on those many of us who aren't deeply familiar with nineteenth century Russian literature. Perhaps Dostoevsky's original audience could be expected to point at a passage and exclaim "OH SNAP, TURGENEV!" (or whatever the equivalent may have been), but it's all lost on me.

In summary, Demons is not a bad book. There's quite a lot of beautiful writing in it, for one thing. But it's deeply flawed to my eye. I would be very interested in hearing the perspective of an academic who holds this book up to be a great example of literature and hear what they think is so important about it. I, in my ignorance, can't simply claim there's nothing to it... but I am moved to ask what "it" may be.

DDDP: fin

2007-12-13T03:39:23+00:00

Well, I guess that's it. I don't have a lot to say about the denouement. Stepan Trofimovich set himself up as the swine in which to cast out the titular demons, but I don't feel like his death from generic Victorian disease really had any meaning. Like Chris, I don't understand what his character meant or why it took such a major role in parts of the book while being so uninvolved with the central plot.

The conspiracy completely fell apart, and I guess that's the message: the weakness of man and the inevitability of failure in such revolutionary endeavors. I think tomorrow I'll start that food book that Heather recommended.

DDDP: home stretch

2007-12-13T00:19:40+00:00

I'd like to finish this book tonight, but such goals have in the past fallen short of expectation, so I figured I'd share some thoughts now. Also, this way I get to use “penultimate.”

I'm probably behind most of the group at this point, so I'm going to go ahead and talk in particulars instead of generalities. So, if you don't want to know what's happened, you know, here there be spoylers.

I'm at the start of the penultimate chapter. There have been several murders recently, but Shatov's is the one that really matters; that was the one that was to bring the fivesome together. A couple of minor details bothered me through the otherwise engaging sequence of that murder. First, the fivesome itself. I don't know if that number has some historical or numerological significance—Internet says that five represents grace and redemption in the Bible, most notably in Exodus—but it's not the number itself that bothers me; I have a hard time keeping track of who exactly compose the five. The annoying part is that I don't think the actual five even matter; every character in this book, outside of brief bursts of passion, lacks dimension, and most of the characters that have been attending the revolutionary meetings might as well all be the same. Inclusion or exclusion in this inner circle would only serve to create symbols of loyalty or favor for a particular sort of thinking or whatever rather than reveal any more about Pyotr Stepanovich. In fact, I think that the Shigalyov's rejection of the murder was meant to be a message along these lines: he advocated idealism taken to a bloody extreme yet would not condone the killing of someone that wouldn't survive his revolution—a Slavophil and, though Shatov was supposed to be a student, someone seemingly not extremely bright—perhaps because the overt reason for the killing was the survival of the group rather than the betterment of society. The fivesome hasn't really done anything for society other than print some pamphlets, and all of the revolutionary talk they've had had been a sea of nonsense and empty words, the satire of the revolutionary groups.

I guess one of the things of that bothered me initially is that synopses say that this book is satire, and from that I expected the book to be funny. I won't try to discuss the nature of humor or whether it really was funny in 19th century Russia, but the bulk of the book is more of a morality play than a joke. It's satire in that it creates caricatures of the Russians, both the aristocracy and the revolutionaries, and especially their overlap, and Dostoevsky's opinions and lessons are presented by emphasizing absurdities. The annoying part of this technique is that the chief absurdity of the aristocracy is that they're really boring, and, particularly since the narrator is himself part of the idle rich, it's difficult to identify with the writing, making it very boring to read.

Anyhow, the best I can tell is that the fivesome is (or was) Lyamshin, Liputin, Tolkachenko, Virginsky and Shigalyov. Pyotr Stepanovich doesn't count, as far as I can tell, since he's the head of this bizarre organism, and I think I one point Erkel was explicitly excluded from the fivesome, though now he appears to be the new head. Other than Shigalyov, the five characters are basically interchangeable, and I find it kind of weird that I have so little to say about any of them yet managed to spell all of their names correctly without looking them up.

The second thing that bothered me was that the narrator keeps referring to the group as “our people.” This creates an annoying break in the narrative in that it reminds me that the narrator, who isn't involved in the revolutionary groups at all and has been absent for the last couple of chapters, is a character in this story however impossibly; and the emphasis on “our” tries to pull me in along with him. It's probably the second effect that Dostoevsky was aiming for—your crazy thinking will be your doom and all that—but it's a fairly unsubtle way to drive in his point, and it just exacerbates the narrator problem.

On the bright side, even though the narrator manages to wedge himself in to even the scenes where he's absent, it's been pretty interesting the last few chapters, and it's almost over.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 37: 733/733

2007-12-07T05:18:05+00:00

Just in time for Fuck You Fyodor Friday, I am DONE.

Wow. That was a really dull, stupid and pointless book. The satire wasn't funny and the melodrama wasn't sad. The framing device detracts from the suspense instead of creating any, the narrator's presence restricts the focus to the characters who have the least to do with the story, except when the narrator magically ceases to exist and reports to us stuff he could never know, including others' thoughts.

The last 100 or so pages are so chock full of incident that they make you wonder why on earth the book was so long, and then before any of these incidents can be processed or justified, the book's over. It's that same lopsidedness as in Lord of the Rings, where it's hundreds of pages of wandering in the woods at the beginning and then when you finally get to the Pelennor Fields it's a couple paragraphs of "Oh man, it was epic, you shoulda been there. PS I'm tired of writing."

Here's an example of the appalling awkwardness, from the very last chapter. Keep in mind, in the previous chapter, Dostoevsky pulled out the Weeping On The Deathbed scene and the chapter before that there was the Baby Delivery Of Horrific Pain But Then Renewed Hope. So, to continue with the American Graffiti style wrap-up of morbidity:

The police accosted the new mother, who was still conscious; and here it came to light that she had not read Kirillov's note, but precisely why she had concluded that her husband had been killed as well - this they could not get out of her. She only cried that "if the other one was killed, then my husband has been killed, too; they were together!" By noon she had fallen into unconsciousness, from which she never emerged, and some days later she died. The baby caught cold and died even before her.

SERIOUSLY? Just like that? I guess I'm just lucky to live in an age when doctors are able to arrest the progression of Despair before it becomes fatal. I thought this was supposed to be based on a real-life murder, and not a bunch of laughable cliches.

Anyway. Whatever. It's over. I'm never reading another Dostoevsky book. In fact, anything at all from a 19th century aristocrat would take some serious convincing.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 36: 608/678

2007-12-06T08:43:19+00:00

This book just won't end.

Finally, the political murder spoiled in the Foreword has occurred. I fail to see what goal it could possibly achieve, or even why that character in particular was singled out as the target. I guess it's meant to be a tragedy?

I'm gonna try really hard to finish tomorrow. There's way too much good stuff on my shelf I could be not wasting my time on.

DDDP: End of part two

2007-11-30T01:02:32+00:00

I don't even know what page I'm really on anymore. I read the appendix, the censored ninth chapter of Part Two, so I guess I'm at 458 plus the thirty some extra. There are about 200 hundred pages left to go.

With the new variations in this second part, I've figured out some of the aspects of the book that I don't enjoy. Pretty much every passage that was fun to read was one where the narrator was not involved. This book is effectively written from the view of an omniscent third party, so it seems like the book would be better if Fyodor Michaelovich wasn't pretending that his all-seeing eye is also a character. Watching Pyotor Stepanovich and Nikolai Vsevolodovich, both nearly insane but in different ways, can be fascinating, but that G―v joker could take the fun out of a circus on the moon. I like it when the narrator disappears; the story becomes at those points more about the characters and less about tediously overt reactions to the characters.

The book is also fun when people go totally off their rockers, but, like Krusty taught us, it's only funny if the sap's got dignity. Anything that Stepan Trofimovich does is annoying and dull. Nikolai Vsevolodovich's confession was interesting, and Pyotor Stepanovich's breakdown after the meeting was riveting. Even the governor's breakdown was fun to read, but then Mr. Narrator came back in and drug the whole rest of that last chapter back into dullsville. Yulia Mikhailovna's entourage seems like it could be interesting—it's a bunch of spoiled rich youth on the path to anarchy—but the narrator seems to view them as little more than spoiled youth.

No one's died yet, and only a couple of the chapters in this section seemed to be moving the plot towards that eventual climax. Most of my curiosity at this point about Part Three is what's going to happen to eat up all of those pages. I hope it's not all taken up by that stupid fête.

DDDP - Day 29, pgs. 257-458 + 682-714

2007-11-29T18:56:20+00:00

Finally made my way to the end of Part 2. The extra pages noted in the title comprise the Appendix which was, according to the foreword, originally intended to be the last chapter of Part 2. Having read it, I'm fairly amazed that it wasn't kept in the original printing.

Part 2 is a large step up from Part 1 in sheer entertainment value, though some may consider that to be damning with faint praise. The game is afoot, as it were, with plots and manipulations forming. The focus shifts to Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky and Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin (the fact that I could type those names without referring to the text is indicative of how frequently they come up within it), and theirs is an interesting relationship that seems to be half antagonism and half comradeship. Stepan himself has receded almost entirely to the background following a brief scene with Varvara Petrovna and she, too, has been silent for some time now.

The highlight for me, personally, was chapter 7, titled "With Our People", in which Nikolai and Pyotr attend a meeting of the local revolutionaries. From my limited experience with left-leaning activist groups it was spot on in lampooning the general sense of passion and lefter-than-thou sniping which prevails. That Dostoevsky was prescient of murderous "socialist" tyrants like Stalin, Mao and others with his character of Shigalyov was interesting to me. The revelation which follows soon after that Pyotr is in no way a socialist but rather a bloodthirsty seeker after power leads me to believe that ol' Fyodor had probably encountered a few people just like him in his day. While Demons is supposedly a condemnation of revolutionary thought, it so far seems that what he is damning is the tendency for authoritarians to adopt any guise or superficial ideology necessary in order to conquer their fellow men.

Especially intriguing to me was the mention of Proudhon by the unnamed lame teacher present at the gathering who suggests that the "despotic and fantastic pre-resolutions of the problem" ('the problem' being what to do with the hopelessly irredeemable masses... Shigalyov suggests slavery while others suggest wholesale slaughter) that Shigalyov suggests are shared by Proudhon. Proudhon was one of the early anarchist writers and the theorist who split the International Working Men's Association between his ideas and those of Karl Marx primarily over the problem of the source of revolution. Marx expected a revolution of the working class to be led by the intelligentsia, academics, and other middle-to-upper-class (and maybe beyond) socialists while Proudhon believed firmly that only the working class could lead itself in rebellion (unless I'm conflating my memories of his writing with those of Bakunin... they were similar, regardless). He also believed in peaceful revolution, which is what raised my eyebrow relative to his theoretical association with Shigalyov. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, I highly recommend reading Proudhon as he was among the original proponents and theoreticians of anarchism and the basic ideas and concepts have yet, I believe, to be better distilled and described.

Finally, the appendix. The missing last chapter. I said I was amazed that it had been left out of the original printing, and I certainly am. That chapter goes a long way to filling in pretty much every gap there is in the picture of Nikolai Stavrogin's character and I'm curious to see what might be revealed in Part 3 that made the publisher feel it was unnecessary.

Onward.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 28: 460/678

2007-11-28T06:06:32+00:00

End of Part Two. Also past the 2/3 point (not counting Foreword, Appendix, or Notes). It's less dull but still uninvolving.

I'm taking a break to read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. And reread the Southland Tales comics.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 25: 423/678

2007-11-26T05:15:50+00:00

The total shrank because I read the Appendix, which was the censored Part Two, Chapter Nine. I liked it! It gave motivation and character and stuff. I also liked Part Two, Chapter Eight in which the satire finally came off as insightful and entertaining. If these trends continue... ayyyyy!

Other News: Had a very good but very busy Thanksgiving break. Saw my mom, dad, grandma, aunt, uncle, sister, radlab0, wonkodsane, bjuarez, and my good friend Ilana. Thanks, everyone, for feeding me and loving me and stuff! Got a bunch more awesome footage for the documentary too. Shooting is almost half done.

Played all the way through Portal. Even more amazing than everyone says. I can't wait for the sequel where the robots might actually move. I don't know if it was the 360 controller or my general lack of FPS expertise, but I was absolutely terrible at falling-while-shooting-where-I'm-about-to-land, and every time they made me do that the game stopped being fun. My favorite part, though, (not counting the song, obviously) was that eyeball that's like an exciteable child: "That thing has numbers on it! Oh, you're the lady from the test! HI!!!!1!!!"

DDDP: Page 412

2007-11-24T03:05:46+00:00

I have fifty some pages left in part two. When I started the book, I set for myself a similar goal to the one I had with Gravity's Rainbow— about thirty pages a day, or in the case of Demons rounded up to a chapter—but as I fell more and more behind and found more excuses to leave the book unopened for days at a time, I stopped really caring about goals. I'll finish the book, but I don't care when. I learned a new word today, “shigalyovism,” which I'll have to remember if I ever find myself talking about solutions to social problems.

This book seems most interesting when people stop talking and start doing things, but that doesn't happen very often, and the things they do either don't amount to anything, like the duel, or don't seem to have any meaning at all, like the visit to Semyon Yakovlevich. Sure, I guess each has each has meaning—the duel established some character, and the visit to the holy fool introduced the idea of inspired religious madness than be seen and contrasted in other characters—but as events they were meaningless. The plot itself is spread thinly across an expanse of endless paper blackened with empty words. I think I have a new metaphor for how Vegemite is supposed to be spread.

People have finally started talking about the murder, mostly in terms of the use of a murder with purely political motives. An angry mob is starting to form, though it's not yet clear where their anger is going to be directed. I suppose I could just read the foreword to gain that bit of perspective, but I don't care that much. The malice resonating within the group of conspirators seems to be pointing to that small handful of characters I sort of like, the sons of the annoying couple from the beginning and Shatov, the serf turned pamphleteer. I like those characters above any of the others since they seem the only ones able to look at this ridiculous mess with apathy.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 17: 350/714

2007-11-17T10:59:08+00:00

Very near the halfway point now.

I have searched for new and novel and detailed ways to express myself, but tonight, lacking patience, I'll resign myself to one of the classics:

This book sucks.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 15: 281/714

2007-11-15T10:21:43+00:00

Finally cracked and went back and finished the Foreword. Reeeeeeally should have been more of an Afterword, as it tells you who dies at the end. That's smart. Whatever. I guess I can give up on any emotional attachment I might have thought I would have had, because:

He suppresses narrative commentary on his characters' words and feelings, explanation of their motives, examination of their thoughts, the broad "painting" of descriptive realism. All commentary comes from other characters, among whom is the narrator-chronicler himself.

Okay, except that it never does come. And then the narrator disappears, and stuff that he couldn't possibly know keeps happening.

The absence of commentary intensifies the behavior of the characters and at the same time leaves it enigmatic.

Is there any conceivable ADVANTAGE to the distance caused by these enigmas? No.

Aware that his artistic method left his work open to misunderstanding...

...because being frequently misunderstood is the hallmark of all excellent writers...

...Dostoevsky tried to include directives for the reader through the heightening of contrasts, the multiplying of contradictions and confrontations, and, in this case, the "mechanical" pointing of his title, supported by two epigraphs.

Mr. Peavey (one of the translators) then goes on to speculate for over two full pages about what these "demons" might be, since Dostoevsky never gives a clue in the novel itself. Isms, in my opinion, are not good! Only the penitent man shall pass! The killer in me is the killer in you!

Take a closer look at that last excerpt. What he just said, if you decode the academia-ese, is that you're gonna see a bunch of CRAZY PEOPLE YELLING AT EACH OTHER FOR NO REASON and that apparently equals brilliance.

The book is certainly much more readable now, though, than it was 100 pages ago, and I guess I should just count myself lucky I never had to read this thing for a class and spend 10 pages of my own fellating it.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 14: 256/714

2007-11-14T07:59:01+00:00

So I had to take a break to read the Southland Tales prequel comics (finally comes out tomorrow, yay!) and Beowulf (comes out Friday). Neither of those took very long. Jumped back in and stuff isn't exactly happening but at least people are TALKING ABOUT stuff happening instead of talking about NOTHING.

And now the narrator isn't even there. Genius device.

A lot of debating about the existence of God, with no context or consequences given.

Oh, there was a gun. Guns are pretty cool, when they eventually go off.

DDDP - Day 13, pgs. 125-256

2007-11-13T23:05:32+00:00

QXZ has added a photo to the pool:

Finally past Part I.

DDDP - Day 13, pgs. 125-256

2007-11-13T18:19:36+00:00

No, I didn't read all those pages in one day. 19.6 pages/day isn't a great average but, as we keep telling ourselves, it's not a competition.

The book has gotten MUCH more interesting now that Part 1 is over. Part 2 immediately thrusts us into the plotting and scheming of the two sons, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky. Uneasy alliances seem to be the order of the day, with vague mentions of a "society" that's out to kill those who've left it and undisguised tension between supposed comrades. That people are being used, and using one another, is clear. Precisely to what ends we do not yet know, though the assumption is some sort of radical political upheaval. I'm interested to see how a supposedly socialist overthrow is going to be led by an upperclass serfmaster if it happens at all. Stavrogin's allegiances are merely hinted at thus far, or spoken about in a vague past tense, so it could go in several directions.

An excellent scene, I thought, between Shatov and Stavrogin with a heartbreaking portrayal of Shatov as a man who feels betrayed by his idol and mentor and yet cannot break from his devotion. It managed to be both expository and a character illustration, which is something of an accomplishment.

The main thing I'm curious about is whether and how the entirety of Part 1 will turn out to be necessary to the story. My assumption is that our future understanding of what's happening will turn on our detailed education in the fine complexities of our characters' social structure.

Dethpakt days 2-3-4

2007-11-06T16:57:44+00:00

Hi! I'm in Panama City Beach, watching my little brother compete in the Ironman Florida. Guess what's not with me? Yup, in my rush out of work yesterday I left Demons sitting on my desk. D'oh!

Dethpack Day 6: p. 206 (end of Part I)

2007-11-06T16:53:27+00:00

Maybe it's that I don't have a television or any sort of social life, but unlike most of the other members of the Dethpakt I am not frustrated by the pace of the book so far.

Anyway, the pace seems to be picking up with the entrance of Nikolai Stavrogin and Pyotr Verkhovensky. I think I can see where the nihilism will come in.

I'm more confused by the Dasha story-arc, and I have to say that I do feel pretty rotten for her.

One plot summary of the book says: "At the end of Book I all of the major characters have been introduced, but very little has been resolved. Dostoevsky uses this tension and confusion to build upon in Book II. Book I is typical of Dostoevsky in that he focuses on the character development, which is then incorporated to produce a scandalous climactic scene. He also creates a sense of disarray that sets the scene for the chaos that is to follow."

Tangentially related, here is Charles Bukowski's poem Dostoevsky:

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn't have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.

DDDP: Foreward through p. 33

2007-11-06T05:15:16+00:00

I feel very far behind from the pack, but my attention is currently split between two books. I broke out Demons the other day during SSR time. My students begged me to read the book to them, too, until I read 3 or 4 sentences out loud. I guess they're a little young yet, eh?

The story itself is moving very slowly right now, though one or two of the narrator's comments have made me smile.

I'd be reading a lot faster if I hadn't had a parent call in concerned about The Golden Compass. Have you heard of this? Of course you have. So naturally I have to read the book for myself. It's completely sucked me in. So much for feeling intellectual. That's right: Dostoevsky has taken a back seat to a children's book. Hopefully I'll finish it this evening or tomorrow and catch up with everyone.

DDDP: Week 1 - Game and match

2007-11-05T05:15:16+00:00

zophos has added a photo to the pool:

I'm taking this as a sign and moving on.

DDDP: Week 1 - 53/704 = 7.5%

2007-11-05T00:53:44+00:00

Can I just tell you how intensely hilarious this book is? I have been LITERALLY slapping my knee all week. I laugh until the tears roll down my cheeks. In fact, The Devils is so funny that I can't read more than 2 pages at a time. The antics of Mr. V and that ball-busting Mrs. Stavrogin keep me in stitches.

Witness this howler:

"A remarkable Russian poet, who was not without a sense of humor, seeing the great Rachel for the first time on the stage, cried rapturously: "I wouldn't exchange Rachel for the Russian peasant!" I'm prepared to go farther: I'd gladly give all the peasants in Russia for one Rachel. It's time we took a more sober view of things and didn't mistake our native pitch for bouquet de l'imperatrice."

As one of you stated better, I didn't understand Gravity's Rainbow but I still enjoyed it. This book is the opposite.

Also, my book started on page 21.

DDDP: Page 80

2007-11-04T04:17:23+00:00

I didn't read on Friday, so I'm only two chapters in. I set a chapter a day as a sort of goal, but I don't know if I'll bother to catch up on Sunday.

My thoughts on the book so far basically mirror Chris's, so I won't repeat all of that. Instead I've been trying to figure out why I find this book so dull. I enjoy a lot of Victorian literature; I even took a class in it and I don't think I had to, French took care of most of my humanities credits. Victorian novels share a lot of the same features—idle rich sitting around getting offended and catching the vapors or whatever—but at least stuff happens once in a while in them. A vampire will come crashing in or someone undergoes some emotional development or at least someone will have the courtesy to die and give everyone else something to legitimately lament. Nothing at all has happened in these two chapters. The characters are boring and unlikeable and nothing is happening. It's like I'm reading one of those awful soap opera comic strips out of a 150 year old newspaper. Demons wasn't the title used in the original translation of this book, and I'm starting to think it was really called Apartment 3-Г.

The dust jacket tells me there will be a murder, there will be something involving revolutionaries. I hope things start going in that direction soon. I'm still only two chapters in, so I'm still hoping that I'm in the middle of a very long-winded setup.

DDDP Day 3, pgs. 80-124

2007-11-03T23:22:07+00:00

QXZ has added a photo to the pool:

A bit further along; one more chapter.
isota.blogspot.com/2007/11/dethpakt-day-3-pgs-80-124.html

Dethpakt - Day 3 (pgs. 80-124)

2007-11-03T19:44:12+00:00

Finished Part 1, Chapter 3, which was primarily concerned with the social intrigue in Stepan's social circle; matchmaking, paranoia about past indiscretion and future infidelity. A new character, the engineer Alexei Nilych Kirillov, has appeared, and seems to be a potential source of disruption and upheaval. His theories about suicide appear to serve both as illustrative of his nihilism (Nilych... cute, no?) and possible foreshadowing either in literal terms or more metaphorically, in line with his assertion that to fearlessly commit suicide is to become God. Though, of course, he like Stepan claims to be athiest.

It's difficult at this point for me to imagine what relevance a lot of the events of this chapter may have to the story later on. Certainly there is a deepening of mistrust and ulterior motive between the various characters. Seeds are being planted which will surely produce discord among the ranks of either the political club or the town's aristocracy. Stepan is revealed to be even more ridiculous and contemptible than we've previously seen and it's clear that Anonymous Chronicler (though slightly less anonymous now) has no desire, in the future of his retelling, anyway, to present Stepan in any kind of sympathetic light. Stepan is at the mercy of his ego, still wishing to be seen as important, influential and dangerous, and is tortured by both unrequited love (in the form of the domineering Varvara) and inappropriate/impossible ardor (for his former student Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdov). Is it this latter infatuation with Praskovya that drives a wedge between Stepan and the AC? AC has revealed his desire to be "introduced" to Praskovya, even though he realizes an actual pairing with her is impossible.

Anyway, I'm hoping that Dostoevsky will soon move on from putting the pieces on the board and begin the actual game. Then again, we're still in the first act and perhaps the slow build of anticipation is entirely what Fyodor is intending to achieve here.

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact Day 3: 111/733 (15%)

2007-11-03T09:05:07+00:00

Things have become significantly clearer since the first chapter. There's actual dialogue, and it's easy to follow (when it doesn't concern characters we haven't even met yet). And the narrator has stepped in and done stuff, even if he won't tell us his full name (God, I HATE 19th century literary conventions, I HATE them). So far, the plot is as I feared: weak, weeping people agreeing to things they don't want to and feeling grievously offended over trivial social gaffes. Isn't there supposed to be conspiracy and assassination in here somewhere?

And something made my eyes bug out: Stepan Trofimovich, this writer full of supposedly radical ideas, has fifty serfs, and that's just on one of his estates. And I'm meant to feel bad for him because he gets drunk every day and piles up 8000 roubles in gambling debts? GET A FREAKIN JOB YOU BOLSHEVIK SLACKER.

So if, with Gravity's Rainbow, I enjoyed it but didn't understand it, this is the converse.

Also: if all the patronymics were deleted you could shave 100 pages off this book, easy. Kinda like the "And but so then"s in Infinite Jest.

Dethpakt Day 1: pages vii to 27

2007-11-02T12:44:00+00:00

As if on cue, all sorts of distractions arrived in the mail on November 1st, which combined with my World Series-induced sleep debt to limit my progress. This weekend, however, I should have plenty of down-time while watching my brother compete at the Ironman Florida.

So far, there hasn't been much action, but I am getting a good mental image of Stepan. I found myself giggling at quite a few points, two of which I've excerpted below.

Having been involved in academia in some manner for almost my entire life, this passage rings particularly true:

"Later -- though by then he had already lost his lectureship -- he managed to publish (in revenge, so to speak, and to show them just whom they had lost), in a monthly and progressive journal, which translated Dickens and preached George Sand, the beginning of a most profound study –- having to do, apparently, with the reasons for the remarkable moral nobility of some nights in some epoch, or something of the sort. At any rate, some lofty and remarkably noble idea was upheld in it. Afterwards it was said that the sequel to the study was promptly forbidden, and that the progressive journal even suffered for having printed the first part. That could very well have happened, because what did not happen back then? But in the present case it is more likely that nothing happened, and that the author himself was too lazy to finish the study." (p.9)

I really like the phrase "civic grief" (and, for that matter, spleen is a word that has fallen into terrible underuse, IMHO):

"In the course of his twenty-year-long friendship with Varvara Petrovna he used to fall regularly, three or four times a year, into a state known among us as "civic grief" – that is, simply a fit of spleen… Later on, besides civic grief, he also began falling into champagne..." (p.13)

Regarding "civic grief" the endnote says: "The phrase "civic grief," meaning an acute suffering over social ills and inequities, was widely used in Russia in the 1860s; the disease itself became fashionable in Petersburg, where the deaths of some high-school students and cadets were even ascribed to it." How positively emo!

DDDP Day 1, pgs. 1 - 79

2007-11-02T04:15:00+00:00

QXZ has added a photo to the pool:

Finished chapters 1 and 2 of Part 1.
isota.blogspot.com/2007/11/dethpakt-day-1-pgs-1-79.html

Dostoevsky's Demons Death Pact: 28/733

2007-11-02T03:12:39+00:00

I skipped the foreword, because it seemed like it was written for students who need to pass a test. I don't want you to tell me what the themes are or who the tragic figures turn out to be; I don't want to know ANYTHING about a book before I read it. (I frequently refuse to even glance at back-cover summaries, and usually regret it when I don't.) I'll probably read the foreword at the end, to pick up the contemporary context.

So far it reminds me a lot of the Tolstoy I read in high school, Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Not that I can remember much from those. But the style is similar, very dry, very distanced. I can tell Dostoevsky is at least attempting to be funny at times - I'm sure it reads differently in the original Klingon. I find it odd that the narrator won't name himself. Is he supposed to just be Dostoevsky The Omniscient, or a friend of Stepan's?

I'm also generally not interested in what's happening, because (like in most of the Victorian-era literature I've read) these people seem to have no jobs and no ability to express their own emotions. I have no sympathy for that upper-class ennui. The worst that will happen if it continues in this vein is that I just won't care about the characters, but it'll still be pretty easy to keep digesting 30 pages or so every day, and finish in a month. (Not that that's required.)

Quite a contrast to Gravity's Rainbow which would seek to actively confuse me, then give me something really exciting and awesome and hilarious, then gross me out. But somehow I got addicted to that. And I cannot wait to dive into the 1085-page Against the Day when this is all over.

One thing you gotta admire about Fyodor, though: He knew how to rock the beard.

READ OR DIE

2007-11-02T02:23:59+00:00

The death pact is now open. Chris set up a fancy feed aggregator with all of our blags and the flickr pool so we can go all web 2.0 on this.

I am on page 40/773. I'm reading a hardcover edition—Borders happened to have a copy for four or five bucks more than the paperback, and it comes with a little red ribbon bookmark, so hey, why not—of the translation made by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which seems to be the authoritative version. The first seven pages were consumed by the title and section title and a short poem and a Bible verse, and the last nineteen pages are notes explaining details of allusions and historical figures and things like that. I'm at the end of the first chapter, which, despite its name, was basically a big introduction, establishing the characters and probably how the group of liberal-minded misfits was established. I don't actually know where it's going with this; I didn't bother reading the introduction.

Dostoevsky's style reminds me a lot of Victorian literature: it rambles a lot and you have to wade through that flood of words carefully in case it ends up saying something. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just that it's slow and indirect. “Slow” may not be the best word, either, since that one chapter covered most of Stepan's life. It paused and examined a handful of moments, themselves spread across a great amount of time, in careful detail and then jumped to the next thought. Based on the title, “Instead of an Introduction,” I suspect that this style is unique to the chapter.

I'm not really sure what to make yet of Demons. I feel a bit overwhelmed by everything presented so far, and yet nothing's really happened yet. I now know a little bit about the character and history of, presumably, the main players, and through some of the narrator's asides I'm starting to get a sense of Dostoevsky's own disdain for this revolutionary liberalism. I suspect it's more complicated than that, though, since Dostoevsky himself was involved in some revolutionary groups. This first chapter wasn't very satisfying, but I expect a shift, in pace if nothing else, as I continue, so I'll just see how it goes from here.

Dethpakt - Day 1 (pgs. 1-79)

2007-11-02T00:45:42+00:00

It often takes me a while to adjust to the pace of storytelling in literature of the 19th century (am I falsely implying that I read a lot of it?). My attention wandered quite a bit during most of the first chapter of Part 1. Some of this I blame on my modern reading habits of riding the subway and listening to music, but even when I was holed up in the Quiet Reading Zone of my bedroom I had trouble focusing much until Chapter 2, wherein we get beyond heavily footnoted scene-setting and enter the territory of sparsely-footnoted scene-setting.

Footnotes are a necessary evil, I suppose, when reading fiction from a time and place too distant for casual cultural references to survive the journey. But they still interrupt my rhythm and pull me out of the world Dostoevsky is painstakingly building.

We've spent a good deal of time so far getting to know who Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky is through the eyes of the Anonymous Chronicler (acting as Stepan's confidant and our snoop) and while the inner character of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin is still being revealed (or, rather, her machinations become more layered) we have certainly been drawn a detailed portrait of their relationship to each other. It is also clear, however, that this is going to continue to evolve.

As of now I'm theorizing that the Anonymous Chronicler is remaining as such out of fear of persecution for having been involved with the liberal Skvoreshniki political club, but it's hard to say anything definitive while we're still somewhere in the middle of Act 1. AC certainly has a bemused contempt for Stepan, Varvara and the club members and I'm curious to see how that may have developed.

It's unlikely I'll get to post tomorrow about my further reading due to my attendance at a Rock & Roll performance in the evening-time.

Here goes nothing

2007-11-01T14:30:46+00:00

A friend of mine from high school encouraged/invited me to join his reading group known as Death Pact. They read incredibly long, complicated books, and this time around, it's Dostoevsky's Demons. I'll be posting entries about my experiences along the journey, all 733 pages of it. If you don't give two shits about Dostoevsky, do let me know so I can exclude you from those entries.

Reading starts today.

DDDP Day 0, pgs. vii-xxvii

2007-10-31T23:50:13+00:00

QXZ has added a photo to the pool:

Knocked off the Foreword and the Translator's Note on my commute today.
isota.blogspot.com/2007/10/dostoevskys-demons-dethpakt-be...

every six months, we punish ourselves with hefty bricks of words

2007-10-31T20:47:14+00:00

Icon-O-Chris has decreed that the second book to be crushed under the hammer of DETHPAKT will be Dostoevsky's Demons, previously mistranslated as "The Possessed". I'm pretty excited about this. I've never read any Dostoevsky. Anyone who wants to join in and BLARG about the progress, feel free.

I'll have to put aside Mason & Dixon for now, but that's okay, I was only 30 pages in. When I was at The Strand, I noticed that Against The Day was out in paperback, so I picked that up - it seems much more interesting to me than M & D. I also got Catch-22, because Mikey recommended it, and Fragile Things - I'm assuming Gaiman can still bang out quick fun ideas with style even if his novels are dull and predictable.

Now With More Buzzwords

2007-10-31T20:08:04+00:00

I've set up an RSS aggregator for the new Death Pact. For those of you not in the know, an RSS feed is where you get website updates automatically sent to you from time to time. An aggregator takes a ton of those feeds and condenses them into a single one, so you only have to subscribe to one thing. So now you only have to remember the following URL:

http://dethpakt.bangmoney.org

Enjoy living in the future, with its many many buzzwords.

Dostoevsky's "Demons" Dethpakt - The Beginning

2007-10-31T20:37:49+00:00

My interfriends and I like to fancy ourselves literary types, so on occasion we challenge one another to read a classic, "difficult" work of literature. Last time around, about six months ago, it was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I opted out of that particular dethpakt since I had A: already read the book and B: just begun reading Pynchon's later novel Mason & Dixon. If I recall correctly, the GRDP, as it was known, saw a completion rate under 50%.

"What will we read next?" came the query several days ago. Things were suggested, James Joyce rejected. Then Ellen, our resident Library Scientist, submitted Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Demons for consideration and lo, agreements were made. The pakt begins November 1.

The basic rules are: read the book or die in the attempt, and write about your progress somewhere on the interblog. The idea is to finish within a month, but as there is no system of enforcement beyond ridicule and no prize to be had other than satisfaction and cultural stimulation (and perhaps some feelings of superiority), well, just read the thing. If you want. Or don't. Or DIE.

I'll be posting regular updates on my progress-thus-far and thoughts about the book here in this very space. These and other dethpakters' musings are being aggregated at dethpakt.bangmoney.org for convenience and posterity.

On my commute today I thought I'd get somewhat acquainted with the book by reading the foreword and translator's note. The edition I'm reading is the Vintage Classics pressing from 1995, translated by husband and wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is widely considered to be the authoritative version.

In the foreword Pevear provides a rough outline of the novel, summarizes the themes involved, draws brief sketches of the main characters and ruminates on the meaning of the title (which had originally been translated as The Possessed... in fact, the Wikipedia entry for Demons is still filed under this title). Pevear explains that the eponymous demons are the "foreign ideas" of liberalism, socialism, nihilism, anarchism, existentialism, etc., that have possessed the revolutionary characters in the novel and driven them to commit terrible deeds against themselves and others. Dostoevsky, Pevear elucidates, was, by the time he wrote this novel, very much committed to the Slavophil way of thinking; that of respect for God (in the guise of the Russian Orthodox Church) and Mother Russia. This, despite (or because of) Dostoevsky's mock-execution and decade-long imprisonment at the will of the Tsar due to revolutionary activity in the 1840s.

Pevear seems himself convinced that these demons are responsible for many of the horrors of the twentieth century, laying, for example, the atrocities of Stalin at the feet of Communist ideology rather than the despotism of Stalin's regime (perhaps the two are inseparable in his mind... one wonders if he blames the current atrocities in Iraq on Capitalism, or the current regime in Washington, D.C.). Whether these are his actual opinions or merely his defense of Dostoevsky is not clear to me at this time. As someone with sympathy to the "radical left" mode of thought I'm curious to see what I think of Dostoevsky's take on the virulence of these particular memes.

Onward, my droogs.

Dostoevsky's Demons Dethpakt

2007-10-31T16:52:23+00:00

Last spring, some friends of mine held an online book club of sorts for the reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It was known as the Gravity's Rainbow Death Pact.

Recently discussion arose about having another such reading event, and I proposed that a suitable book might be Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsy (also translated as The Possessed and The Devils). I mentioned this work because it has occupied a place on my shelves for several year and thus far has resisted my attempts to read it. I have read and enjoyed all of Dostoevsky's other major works and would like to complete the list.

I initially became interested in Demons after seeing the amazing documentary The Stone Reader. I actually met the subject of that film, Dow Mossman, and talked with him about what he'd been reading, and this is one of the things he recommended.

Dethpakt II officially kicks off on November 1st. For the rules, such as they are, see the link about the original and substitute Demons for Gravity's Rainbow in your reading of it. We also have a Flickr group, and a list of participants and their blogs (for commiseration) will be posted somewhere.

But really, Dethpakt has a better ring to it:

2007-10-31T16:51:58+00:00

Reading Room - Sunday Book Review - New York Times Blog: The illustrious Dr. Baker points out that the New York Times currently has its own online club reading the new translation of War and Peace.

It's that time again...

2007-10-31T05:19:29+00:00

zophos has added a photo to the pool:

Dethpakt 2 - This Time It's Russian

Dethpakt 2: Demons (or The Devils if you're cheap and buy an old translation)

2007-10-31T04:26:25+00:00

Day 0

Yeah, I'm in. I don't know that I'll finish by the end of November though. We should start handing out badges for this stuff.

DDDP Day -1, Page 0

2007-10-31T00:01:53+00:00

QXZ has added a photo to the pool:

My friends and I have initiated a Dethpakt, to read Dostoevsky's "Demons". We're starting on Nov. 1.
You can follow my progress at isota.blogspot.com.

Death pact reading club part two

2007-10-29T03:52:21+00:00

Chris Lumens is setting up a new death pact for November, this time reading Dostoevsky's Demons. I think this a good choice. It follows the theme set with Gravity's Rainbow of exploring reality through a lens magnifying each detail to the point of absurdity, plus it's really long. And it's a classic, so we can pretend we're learning something.

One thing that makes me uneasy is that it wasn't written in English. I don't have anything particular against foreign people, but reading books outside of my own language makes me fear that I'm going to miss some subtleties of the original. I'm going to be at the mercy of the translator. I don't think I'll be able to learn Russian in three days, so oh well.

NEW DETHPAKT!

2007-10-29T00:30:48+00:00

theknittinglibrarian has added a photo to the pool:

Dostoevsky's Demons. Dethpakt begins November 1st!
knowltonian.blogspot.com/2007/10/dostoevskys-demons-dethp...
Follow my progress (or lack thereof) at knowltonian.blogspot.com

Q: Uh, how does this dethpakt thing work?
A: Convince a bunch of your friends to go buy a copy, read it every day, and post your progress somewhere so we can all commiserate. First one to finish "wins", or something.

Death Pact 2!

2007-10-27T20:31:47+00:00

Hey what do you know? I fail at blogging, just like I have the several other times I've had one of these things on my website.

Anyway there's been a recommendation for another reading death pact, this time Dostoevsky's Demons. I haven't read anything by this author before though his name and the size of most of his books already intimidates me a little bit. That's not a serious problem, though. We got through Gravity's Rainbow so I'm not terribly concerned.

Anyway, what do other people think? If this is a good choice, we could start it up in November. Are there other books we should suffer through first?

UPDATE: It's official, we're going to do this. Go to the bookstore and get your copy because we start reading on November 1. Luckily I don't have anything else to do that month, like move or travel.

Day 34 - Completion

2007-06-04T01:57:31+00:00

This morning, I woke up early and finished Gravity's Rainbow. The rest of the book left me confused, amazed, and bewildered. In contrast, the ending left me feeling empty and disappointed. The story just ends, with the main character vanished (dead? insane? dissolved into the universe?) and a chapter from hundreds of pages prior retold from a different perspective to its conclusion. Other characters who seemed extremely important in the first part of the book only to disappear for 400 pages reappear, then also mysteriously vanish with no real conclusion. Then there's the story of the Schwartzcommando who are preparing to fire their rocket but are never heard from again. Characters just disappear from the story entirely. Whole subplots that seemed so important never come to a conclusion. Then, the ending itself describes events that happened chronologically before lots of other parts in the book. Slothrop (more or less the main character), from interacting with other characters, must have known that the thing he was looking for had already happened. So what is he really looking for?

I know that I am looking for some meaning out of this incredibly dense book. At its core, it can be condensed down to an extremely simple story: Slothrop is looking for the rocket 00000 and why he is connected to the substance Imipolex G. But there are dozens or even hundreds of side stories, hidden meanings, and themes. I don't think Gravity's Rainbow disguises its main themes very hard. Obviously, there are the themes of paranoia and conspiracy, the Elect vs. everyone else, notions of fate and free will, and the ever-present sexual metaphor. It'd be too easy to call the whole book a sexual metaphor when it describes all manner of fetish, and I think the fact that it's so blatant means that's not the true meaning of the book.

So what is the true meaning? I haven't figured that out. I don't think a first reading is enough to really get to the bottom of such a complex book. It may not even scratch the surface. I know that I am intrigued by some of the characters, by the appearance of structure to the story. It's easy to dismiss the rambling prose as just crap thrown in for the sake of making a thick book, but so much of it ties back in later on that there must be an underlying structure and meaning. I think everything must have been included for a reason. I'm still thinking about it... reading things other people have written to discern what's going on. There's lots of debate as to the structure having mystical connections. I don't think I am quite ready to understand yet.

For now, I am mentally exhausted. My mind is still running around and around trying to understand but the rest of me is trying to resist opening it back up and looking for more. I need a break from it. I think that even after several other books, I'll need to continue being on a break from it. I may not be ready to dig back into Gravity's Rainbow for several years. The next book I read needs to be much more straightforward. I'm not ready to tackle anything too complicated for quite some time.

I think I'm the fifth person in the Death Pact to finish.

Day 31

2007-05-31T12:33:42+00:00

Here it is, the beginning of day 31 and the last day of the month. I'm still way back at page 601 which is the very beginning of section four. I haven't made much progress in the last week and a half due to Sarah's visit and my rafting trip. Were it not for those things I would probably be done by now. But I'll still finish. It might just take into the first week of June.

After running around in a pig costume for a couple chapters, Slothrop is really starting to lose it. He can't concentrate on what he's doing anymore and is losing touch with what's real vs. what's fantasy. Another reader brought up the point that the chronology is screwed up. I agree. I don't understand why he's looking for the 00000 when from what all the other characters say, it seems like it's already been launched. So what's he really searching for? Perhaps the final section will make these things clear.

Not over yet

2007-05-28T04:29:32+00:00

I'm afraid to read. I'm afraid to write. At every turn, it seems like words may take the shape of Pynchon's terrible haunting and suddenly transform into orgies of corpophagia and rockets and chess symbolism and pirhanas in the dildoes and who knows what else. It's terrifying. I tried picking up another book, and I kept seeing bits of Pynchon's style and found myself unable to go any farther. Maybe it was just a poor choice. Either way, I've perhaps unfairly reconsidered the opinions of the person who recommended it as unreliable. I don't think I'm ready for another serious book yet. I need a palate-cleanser, something that doesn't mean a damn thing and doesn't get all fancy with the words.

I've decided to read Sisters, Lynne Cheney's lesbian Western romance that I paid three digits for a while back in a moment of poor judgment. I bought it mostly for the hey-look-at-the-goofy-thing-I-have aspect, but maybe I can get a buck or two worth of entertainment out of it, too. I read the first chapter, and it looks like it'll be as bad as I could have ever hoped. Even the typesetting is awful, as if some of the letters just don't have the energy to hang onto their given line. Attacking the cheap printing is really kind of ad hominem, though, and the writing itself is not short on failings. It reads like bad slash fiction, full of inflated descriptions of nonsense and words that should never appear in serious works. I'm pretty sure that there has never been a “settee” in anything worthwhile. I know from the Internet that it isn't going to be as titillating as I might hope, but it's still delightfully bad. It even gives me a little hope in that it apparently doesn't take a whole lot in terms of quality to be published. I just hope I don't have to marry a rich Wyoming politician.

Fin

2007-05-27T02:59:41+00:00

I have finished. I will never again feel ashamed for any abuse of parentheses or dashes I commit in the future. Even in the final chapter, I found a tiny detail—the ghost shirt—a bit of trivia tossed into the prose that I only recognized by the words hitting a point in the moiré between myself and Pynchon that we both happen to share, this time because I'd just read a Vonnegut novel that used it as a symbol, yet I have no damn clue what it was supposed to mean.

I have finished.

Biff! Zing!

2007-05-23T03:35:47+00:00

The last few chapters I've read in Gravity's Rainbow are really what it's all about. There's been action, characters intersecting through metaphor, names able by their very mention to invoke ponderances of a dozen others, dramatic irony, entertaining interludes that probably won't mean anything for a while if at all, sex, drugs and dirty songs. I love it.

I read a short chapter over lunch today at Al Capri, where the ziti special was delicious. I had to read most of it while trying to ignore “Slow Ride” playing on the radio, but I only had six pages or so to get through, and a trip to the bike shop earlier had already conditioned me against the wiles of classic rock. They seem to like Pink Floyd and Rush a lot at the bike shop. “Freewill” was playing when I left. When I got home tonight, I found that my usual Tuesday-night medical drama pulp had been preempted by some sort of American Idol–esque reality show junk, so, my head full of chicken and disappointment, I returned again to the sea of words. I'm on page 627, the end of section 3. Bring it, Pynchon.

Biff! Zing!

2007-05-23T03:35:47+00:00

Day 21: still muddling on

2007-05-22T02:52:39+00:00

I'm on page 567 of 776, so if I stop here for the night I'm still on track for the ~25pg/day schedule to finish by the end of the month. Here are some assorted thoughts:

The word “preterite” is used a lot. As noted by another reader, this word is used in Calvinist sense of humanity being divided among the Elect and the Preterite, though Pynchon more often uses it to refer to a kind of existential segregation: without heaven or hell coming into it, Slothrop and other characters are lost in life, free from or unsure of boundaries of allegiance or morality, and this puts them into a sort of hopeless state, muddling through one catastrophe to the next, damned because they were never meant to be saved and unable to find hope because of it. Pynchon also throws in a twist by showing us glimpses of Slothrop's ancestors, Preterite in the Calvinist sense, either for emphasis or just to add to the confusion of this particular line of symbology.

“Moire” is also used with noticeable frequency. Pynchon will just toss the word in here and there, but I think at one point he did make explicit the use of the term to relate to the interference pattern of intersecting personalities. I suppose that Slothrop now being again in Tchitcherine's clothes should be notable within this idea.

I haven't been looking up any of the foreign words as I go through. I find I get the feel for a chapter better without the breaks, and I think that, falling back again to that other experience, V. left me jaded as to this habit's effectiveness. I miss an important symbol here and there, but the Internet didn't know a damn thing about Maltese. I think I'm able to pick up most of the German that matters, I think, and Pynchon was kind enough to spell out the connection between the Schwarzkommando and the S-Gerat.

I do wonder how much of this book is flying completely over my head without me even suspecting it. In V., Vheissu tied into the idea of a hollow earth, a new world underground with its entrances at the poles. The only reason I noticed that at all is because I had just read a Rotten Library article on the topic. Pynchon sure does toss a lot of weird stuff into his books.

There have been some extended interludes away from Slothrop, but there have only been brief returns to earlier characters like Pointsman and Prentice (look out, those P's probably mean something, and the clue isn't in the title this time around). I wonder where he's going with them.

Day 17

2007-05-18T03:47:04+00:00

I'm now at page 527. Slothrop sure does keep getting into trouble somehow. It also looks like he's really starting to lose it - he keeps forgetting where he is or what he's supposed to be doing there, even when it's just been explained to him. He's never going to find the S-Gerat at this rate.

Sarah's coming into town tomorrow night. This might mean that I update this thing less frequently, though hopefully my updates will be more interesting than my slow progress in this book.

Brenschluss

2007-05-16T03:22:18+00:00

I have passed the halfway point. I'm on page 398, still in section 3, which has unfolded in a form more or less close to what I predicted. There are some additional conflicts emerging, and Slothrop is in a hell of a new bind, adding to the interest driving my motivation for finishing.

A couple of overachievers have finished the novel, so the contest aspect is essentially over. I guess we have to decide what to buy for Jared now. Finishing the book by the end of the month has been a sort of informal goal in this game, and, though I'm well behind several of the other readers, I'm still on track for that. One of the commenters says that Section 4 is a return to Section 1's form, and, honestly, I eagerly await it. It's nice to have some plot and a touch of clarity driving the novel, but the twistings of words into opaque tapestries in Section 1 where setting and character floated in and out of consciousness was such a unique drug. I want more.

Day 15 - Winners

2007-05-16T00:05:08+00:00

Today is day 15 of the Gravity's Rainbow Death Pact. I'm at page 457, having quit last night after a really wonderful section involving Poekler and Ilse and then doing a little more reading today.

However, the really big news is that overnight two people announced they finished after fourteen days of reading. The first was Jared. Less than three hours later, Rebecca also got through. Surprisingly, they both seem to be alive and not entirely crazy though neither has much to say about the ending. I guess it's not going to be very remarkable. So it was very close in the end, but there can be only one winner.

I'd like to congratulate Jared for getting all the way through this book faster than the rest of us, despite having a job. I don't know what my excuse for not winning is, then. I'd also like to congratulate Rebecca for finishing so close behind. I wonder who will be third. We never decided on any sort of prize so Jared might have to settle on our admiration and respect. If we want to continue this book club idea then I guess he can also pick the next book. Hopefully it'll be something a little more approachable.

As for the rest of us, it isn't over yet. Keep reading! You still have 16 days left in the month if you want to try to finish by then. That's what I am shooting for. I'm even finding parts of this book enjoyable, though they are buried in a whole lot of text. If you don't have any interest in finishing now that someone's won, you've read a whole lot of dense text for nothing and will probably have to pick it back up again in the future.

Day 12

2007-05-13T02:58:23+00:00

Just a quick note on my progress, since it's been several days. I am sitting just past the middle of my copy, on page 389. It's all downhill from here. If I keep this pace up, I'm sure to finish before the end of the month though I'm positive there are lots of people ahead of me.

And now it's off to bed early so I can hike in the Sandwich Range Wilderness tomorrow.

GRDP: Day 11

2007-05-12T03:00:49+00:00

I've reached the end of section 2 on page 282. Pynchon has proven to me that even within the structure of a steadily-advancing plot, he can still write twisting, confusing, and sometimes absolutely disgusting prose. I have no idea what is going to happen in section 3. I doubt it will be a complete return to the form of section 1 and its mad, whirling style, but I expect there to be longer concentrations on other characters, and maybe even more long tangents to examine a different setting and subplot. But I don't know. I'm over a third of the way through the book now. It's been rough at some points, but I want to find out what happens next.

GRDP: Day 11

2007-05-12T02:00:49+00:00

Day 8

2007-05-09T03:40:21+00:00

I've finished section 2, putting me on page 282 in my copy. The story's really moving now, to the point where I wonder whether I should go back and re-read some of the past couple chapters. The last couple pages of section 2 revealed quite a bit that seems like it's going to be very important later and I must admit I kind of skimmed over it because I knew my goal for the night was in sight.

I'm also a little bit concerned about section 3. Section 2 was really pretty easy. While it wasn't a straightforward novel, the plot was pretty much right out there in the open for me to follow. Section 1 was much more rambling by comparison. I'm worried that section 3 will go back to that form, which would be tough since it's the longest section in the book. Regardless, there's nothing to do but head straight into the zone tomorrow and find out what happens.

It's still keeping up my interest, beyond just the fascination of digging through such a dense book. I think section 2 really got me to enjoy what was going on. I may just be able to finish this thing.