Notes from Underground

“It may seem paradoxical to speak of such insights as liberating, or to find in the Underground Man’s impassioned rejection of rational humanitarianism a call to arms. Yet each age we live thr ...

“It may seem paradoxical to speak of such insights as liberating, or to find in the Underground Man’s impassioned rejection of rational humanitarianism a call to arms. Yet each age we live through as individuals demands a certain kind of book- just as each era thieves the last with a magpie’s lust for the gewgaws of thought. Oddly enough, now I come to look at Notes again- and examine it in the round- I discover that my revised impression of it as a text at once jejune and cynical, callow as well as wise, is not, perhaps, too far from reality.” -Will Self““(Dostoevsky)... is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch.” -James Joyce