Henry Maxwell > Recent Status Updates

Oh how thankful I am to be back! I absolutely love Dostoyevsky's style. I relish how interesting and thought out each character is, how complexly they are designed! And this one begins a bit differently: offering a sort of "backstory" introduction. I laughed out loud when Stepan is writing to Varvara from Berlin and when she reads it, the letter is covered in tears, literally. Mind you, they are friends alone, LOL.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy! More Dostoyevsky! Been thoroughly preparing for this one. Definitely the least blind I’ve gone in for one of his works.

An acid-trip of sorts! Also getting some lotus-flower Percy Jackson vibes, and concurrently some “Eyes Wide Shut” vibes. This book is a trip!

A self-destructive loner turned lover-boy with pretty clear mommy issues.

This is pretty depressing so far. I was pretty captivated by the intro from Harry's fellow lodger, and kind of hyped up the book. So far, I am trying to figure out the structure of the book. Also seems like there are no chapter breaks? Confounding.

“It grieved me. What a comfortless, what a forlorn and shiftless life he led!”

“self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism,”

Been highlighting along for my comprehensive review… phenomenal!

“those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed”

The scene with the angel and the lizard on the shoulder had me cracking up…
“May I kill it?”
…
“May I kill it?”
…
“May I kill it?”
…
“I cannot kill it against your will. It is impossible. Have I your permission?”
…
“Then I may?”

“You cannot love a fellow-creature till you love God”

Marvelous!

A recommendation from TWO friends, I eagerly jumped into this one.

As Lent begins, I found great solace picturing the thought of someone particular coming to retrieve us and bring us to God in Heaven. Notably, the Ghost is clearly entirely scared of the “mountains” and cannot humbly accept that a past antagonizer is there to “help” him. Nor can he accept there is forgiveness and no more “private affair”

Continuously Marvelous!

Marvelous! I must travel to the Motherland!

“coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleaguered in the middle of the night.”

One of many banger quotes in this phenomenal novel. I’ve been utterly captivated by every scene including deep descriptions of food and beverage.

What a fantastic scene! Sharing coffee and lilac honey on rye on a rooftop overlooking summer Moscow!

30 pages in and I’m captivated. This will be getting 5 stars from me. I can feel it

As much as I'd love to just grind through this, it is not a book that can be sped through. I find myself returning to it often, if only for a few segments of Pessoa's prose. It speaks to me at different times, but I find if I read too much of it at once, it does get very dark and depressing. At certain times in my most formative years I found solace in this, but now it often brings me down!

I'm so perplexed, and many of the philosophical references go straight in one ear and out the other, but alas, I must prevail and get through this to get it off my currently reading list. Maybe this is something I'll return to and understand fully once I get deeper down the Philo-Lit pipeline in a decade or so.

“He had died and a new Siddhartha had awakened from his sleep.”