Book club

Middle-aged quasi-famous urbane yuppies gather in little basements in churches and what have you for their book club. The club where instead of reading the book and experiencing a kind of "thrill" at the end or thoughts of some aesthetic breakthrough they sit around and practice their skills at telling others how insightful their experience of the book was. Can I really blame them? If all there is to being a person is what you make others believe, they are on the track to perfection. Passionate, political, incisive, humorous, sensitive. Those are their comments, interspersed with some delightful irony as well as some nice grandstanding on the chair and on the fold-up table.

I know! Let's start a book club! I just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. Here is my summary. Of course, nothing beats slogging through roughly 950 pages of filler.

The author is really talking to himself with the drape of a plot over the whole enterprise. Dmitry represents his passioante youth, which led him astray into prison, labour and pain. Ivan represents his intellectual side: the logical, atheistic curmudgeon who beleives everyhting is permitted because the devil whispers in his ear. Alyosha is his religious and conservative side: the is the best. Yay God! There is a murder and a young boy dies, but it is all redemption. It has to be!

Famous last words: "Why not?"