The Idiot, Finally

I think Prince Myshkin and Aglaya could have been okay together, because they were both hippies. Hippies can survive with other hippies. But hippies will be eaten alive by a repressive army of bourgeoisie. And that's pretty much what The Idiot is about.

I don't know if I'll ever read Crime and Punishment or Notes From the Undergound now. I think I got a bad translation, but Dostoevsky wrote a book in which nothing happens for about 600 pages other than people are elated or offended by the way other people look at them. I suppose the theme is the inability of certain types to act. Near the end -- 3 months into my reading --Aglaya acts and it blows up in her face. When Roghozin acts, it destroys 3 lives, including the Idiot's, who is not really an Idiot but is (as I say) a hippie.

Well, after the hard work of reading The Idiot I thought I'd relax with a Dame Agatha. But Dame Fortuna, a.k.a. Goodwill's book section, could equip me only with Passenger To Frankfort. It's a terrible book, published in 1972 when AC was 82. It's not really an Agatha Christie mystery; it's an old woman using the James Bond motif to rail against the Young. Even taken as the ranting of a reactionary on her last legs, though, it fails because the actions of The Young she rails against were old hat by 1972. Don't bother reading it - I'll tell you right now that it has much to do with the possibility of Hitler being alive, because there is no possible explanation for young people not liking opera other than Hitler is secretly corrupting them.

Anyway, I've got a long bus ride tonight - have to go downtown and actually transfer once -- and today Goodwill coughed up Rootie Kazootie by Lawrence Kaumoff, which I'm looking forward to. I remember watching Rootie Kazootie on TV, or maybe I remember reading a comic book with a character named Rootie Kazootie. Either way, there's some childhood association. So I'm rooting for the book. ("Rooting" -- get it?).

What this is about

It's again been a while since my last post. And, I don't have much time right now; so I'm re-posting the January 24th explanation of what this blog is all abut. I would only note that I have finished The Idiot, and it took only 4 months to do so.

From Jan. 24th:

What I want to do mainly is write about books I read. I work near a Goodwill where, on a good day, I can buy 10 books for $5. Because it's a Goodwill, of course, I can't intend to buy anything in particular, and I'm at the mercy of whoever it is that donates books to Goodwill.

In other words, it could happen (and has) that I finish Voltaire and start Mary Higgins Clark. David Baldacci follows Turgenev. Winston Groom precedes Mark Twain. It's very random, topsy-turvy, indiscriminate.

Kind of like the bus I'm riding while I read. I started taking the bus over 2 years ago, for environmental reasons, mainly; though it's turned out it saves money, too. (By the way, once in a while I survey the cars going by the bus stop. In Omaha, on the average, 92 out of a hundred cars are occupied only by their driver.)

The bus goes straight down Center Street. I get on near Interstate 680, and the first leg of the ride is through veritable suburbia, with lawns brick houses and access roads. It swoops down a long hill, eases through an area of strip malls past a Walgreens and a supermart, past a cemetery and up into a hospital complex. Emerging from that, we're in a city, an industrial city, with mud on the street, dilapidated buildings, industrial businesses. We massly transit that and are back to a residential area. That's where I get off.

So it's one change after another both inside and outside the bus. The passengers change as drastically as the quality of the books and the scenery. There are only one or two that are there most days; for the most part, it's a mixed and unpredictable lot.

So that's the set-up. I've got a backlog of books to review, which is good: I'm currently reading The Idiot, and it could take me two years to get through it. I'll start reviews with the next entry.