I started reading Joseph Conrad’s from Under Western Eyes last week and am thoroughly enjoying it, which is odd because I started reading it years ago for a class but quit after 50 pages. It put me to sleep. But after spending most of the semester reading Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, anything that wasn’t a twisted and shocking psychological thriller came off as ho-hum. I wanted scandal. I wanted crazies. I wanted my vocabulary to be challenged by a psycho killer. fa fa fa.

Under Western Eyes takes the classic Russian novel’s backdrop of political rebellion and puts it in a college student’s dorm room. Murder, rumors, Princes, and drunkenness permeate the story. Traces of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment are visible in the main character and his subversive, murderous compatriot. I still can’t decide which one Conrad intended as ‘his Raskolnikov,’ but both of them seem to suffer from their own delusions.

In other irrelevant news, I reorganized the links on the right to make it easier to find stuff.