The Underground Man Ross Macdonald Underground Man Ross Macdonald The Underground Man Macdonald, Ross [pseud. Original black cloth and orange boards. Owner signature, else fine in very good dust jacket. The Old Mill Bookshop Published: Owner signature, else fine in very good dust jacket Edition: A Lew Archer novel. Argosy Book Store Published: Cloud 9 Books Condition: Fine in dust jacket with crease on inner front flap. Fine in dust jacket with short crease on inner front flap. Book weighs 1 pound. Cloth backed boards, top edge stained black. A mystery featuring Lew Archer. A fine copy in near fine dustjacket with mild fading to the spine panel.

Fine in a Nf. A few tiny edge nicks in dj. Light creasing at upper edge of front dj. Fine in Very Good- dust jacket. Quarter bound publisher's black cloth over orange boards, gilt lettering on spine, deckled edge, top edge dyed black. Orange dust jacket, blue and white lettering on front and spine.

Pages lightly yellowed by age, else tight, clean, square, and unmarked. Dust jacket lightly shelf worn, two or three small chips on upper and lower edges of spine, some fading. Fine in Very Good- dust jacket Edition: Fine in dust jacket with two creases to front flap. Near fine in somewhat sunned dust jacket. Dust jacket has crease and minor rubbing at head of spine, else fine, with new publisher's price sticker 80p on front flap. Steven Temple Books Published: Andrew Barnes Booksellers Published: Very good in dust jacket with internal stain at base of spine, a short closed tear and wear at spine ends and along edges and folds.

First Edition, First Printing. Evening Star Books Published: Very near Fine Edition: Slight sunning to top edge of boards; one spot to front fore-edge; else a near fine copy in a bright near fine jacket without the usual fading to the spine. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem.

Return to Book Page. Jessie Coulson Translator, Introduction. The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground! The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him — his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality.

Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly study of human consciousness. Paperback , Penguin Classics , pages. Published July 30th by Penguin Books first published January 29th To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Did anyone else notice that the movie "Fight Club" was really "The Double"? Lists with This Book. Magazine - "Shot By Both Sides" http: View all 27 comments.

I enjoyed the narrator's pithy voice while he went over the events which lead to his "living underground". It also contains Dostoyevsky's infamously morbid black humour which has you smiling at the most desolate of images. I strangely found myself relating with the narrator which probably says a lot about my outlook on life. I read Crime and Punishment in 24 hours but this novella took me longer to read than Dostoyevsky probably took to write it. It is a juvenile piece of melodramatic garbage, a black smudge on Dostoyevsky's almost perfect oeuvre. Its inclusion in this collection baffles me.

The Double was written when Dostoyevsky was only 25 while Notes from Underground and his other major works were written when he was in his 40s and 50s. He was clearly not a wunderkind. Even at the beginning of this Penguin edition it even notes that The Double was not successful when it was first published. I can hardly wonder why. It's so boring that it gives solitary confinement a run for its money. Now we know why the narrator of Notes from Underground was so bored, he has to share the same book with the characters from The Double. View all 3 comments. Apr 11, p. If spite makes you unworthy of a single pound, Try to write about your life in the underground.

If this makes life as cold as ice, To read Dostoevsky is my advice. Apropos of the spite, what can I say about Notes from underground? Allow me to tell you my pers If spite makes you unworthy of a single pound, Try to write about your life in the underground. Allow me to tell you my personal story behind this book. I was hesitating about reading this novella because of what I had previously read about it and so I tried to do it twice this year. So I tried to save it for a more spiteful time. Then one day I felt neither cheerful nor spiteful: So, like I said, I do understand why people do not like it.

It could be a depressing, miserable reading — for me, it was deliciously depressing. While reading the first part I felt quite… scolded, mocked, reproached! In this same part, Dostoevsky plants his most fundamental ideas, which would completely bloom till The brothers karamazov.

For instance, he describes a dystopian idea of how morals and fate — or rather life — would be if they were ruled my numbers and math: If the latter were supposed to rule us, where would our free will begin? That reminds me of the famous chapter in The brothers Karamazov: The grand inquisitor , in which the inquisitor is talking to Christ who actually never speaks throughout the conversation , and here Dostoevsky points out a very interesting interpretation of the Gospel according to St.

He wants people to believe on their own. And the same goes for science and numbers kind of: On the other hand, in the second part the underground man tells a story, more what we are used to read from Dostoevsky, with its gloomy scenarios and sorrowful people, the monologue-like conversations, the psychological analysis, etc etc. What would you do if one day you were walking by a solitary street and you ran into your so-far-unknown identical twin?

Would you recognize this person immediately as your twin? The double is such a tale about a man, Mr. Golyadkin, who one day finds out there is a new man in town who is identical to him and has the same name as him. This man, known as Golyadkin Jr. It turns out that Golyadkin Junior is now taking over the original Golyadkin, the original hero and little by little the latter is driven to madness. The whole story is about madness though and utterly paranoid — you know, just Dostoevsky being himself with his crafty psychology. The author uses the absurd to shape his story but the core of it, I think, resides in the fact that we ourselves make multiple selves out of the original one: For instance, we might behave differently according to the people we are with, to the place we are at, to the occasion we are living and so on and so on, and then we might even doubt of our own existence, just like Mr.

Golyadkin does at some point of the story. Then the mean twin turns out to be everything the doctor prescribed Golyadkin to be: Unfortunately, there was room for only one self — who do you think survived? Some of the paragraphs were well written and very meaningful, but others were more tedious and kind of repetitive. Nonetheless, I think he did it on purpose, especially since I realized that the one who did it the most was Golyadkin himself: I have a plan: Let people get furious and put me under treatment, let them make me reasonable. Dostoevsky, in a letter to his brother Mikhail at the age of View all 8 comments.

I've not much to say about this book that hasn't been said before. Both stories are nice and deep. Though hard going at times - I think that was largely due to translations - I loved this book. I'd love to read it in Russian, but I don't speak Russian: Jan 23, Blair rated it really liked it Shelves: Notes from Underground is sublimely misanthropic, dripping with scorn, blisteringly horrible.

Its narrator is the anonymous 'underground man', whose voice and attitude make him seem a practice run for Crime and Punishment 's Raskolnikov. In the first part of the book, he lays out his personal philosophy, a bitter attack on — well, just about everything, including himself. In the second, 'The Story of the Falling Sleet', he relates a sequence of events that acts as an illustration of his paranoia, rage and self-loathing, starting with his obsessive quest to humiliate an officer he hates, and ending with his cruel rejection of a prostitute, Liza, whom he both loves and despises. Despite a lapse into sentimentality when the narrator first encounters Liza, the tone remains acrid throughout, resigned to shame and misery.

The Double is a much earlier novella The plot sees a fawning government clerk, Golyadkin, tormented by a man who appears to be his exact double. The Double drags, and while he's entertaining in small doses, Golyadkin is neither hero nor antihero, just a supremely irritating character.

I wish the order of the novellas had been swapped, or I'd thought to read The Double first. Reading it after Notes from Underground felt like eating a meal in the wrong order — a perfectly adequate main course after a spectacular dessert. According to the blurb, they're grouped together because both are 'masterly studies of the human consciousness', but they're so very different that seems like a reach.

My advice is to skip The Double and read Notes from Underground on its own.

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At last comes the act itself, the revenge. The wretched mouse has by this time accumulated, in addition to the original nastiness, so many other nastinesses in the shape of questions and doubts Nothing remains for it to do but shrug the whole thing off and creep shamefacedly into its hole with a smile of contempt in which it doesn't even believe itself. There in its nasty stinking cellar our offended, browbeaten and derided mouse sinks at once into cold, venomous, and above all undying resentment.

It will sit there for forty years together remembering the insult in the minutest and most shameful detail and constantly adding even more shameful details of its own invention, tormenting and fretting itself with its own imagination. It will be ashamed of its fantasies, but all the same it will always be remembering them and turning them over in its mind, inventing things that never happened because they might have done so, and forgiving nothing. At times I would even rate them above myself. This quite often happened to me at that time; at one moment I despised them, at the next I felt they were superior to me.

That is, I didn't actually enjoy my walk at all: I experienced an endless series of torments, crushing humiliations and attacks of spleen It was an agonising torment, a never-ending unbearable humiliation, caused by the suspicion, constantly growing into clear-cut certainty, that compared to them I was a fly, a nasty obscene fly — cleverer, better educated, nobler than any of them, that goes without saying — but a fly, always getting out of everybody's way, humiliated and slighted by everybody.

Moreover in the very worst paroxysms of my fever of cowardice I still dreamed of coming out on top, winning them over, making them like me, if only for my 'elevated ideas and undeniable wit'. There was a great deal of noise in one of the other rooms, further away; some shouting, even, the noisy laughter of a whole mob of people, and some nasty French-sounding screams; 'ladies' were being entertained. In short, everything was sickening.

Apr 28, Wealhtheow rated it it was ok Shelves: Hey wait, are you a misanthrope? Do you feel betrayed and disappointed with life? Are you a bitter, bitter man? Why narrator, I never would have guessed! Why don't you spend the next hundred pages telling me about it? That sounds like loads of fun. A genius of a book written by a mind that can effortlessly delve into the nuts, bolts and avagadros of the psyche. Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.

He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The mor A genius of a book written by a mind that can effortlessly delve into the nuts, bolts and avagadros of the psyche. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. After the Upanishads, it took around human years for man to explore the innards of himself; By a drunkard and a pathological gambler to be this original, before the world wars, before the pentium processors, before blogging, before any one single man had any guts to sit in a corner and think for himself about himself and his insignificance in the scheme of things, is what makes this book a precious gem.

PS- My copy of the book is bound in an apt cover featuring the handsome self portrait of Kramskoy; Cant find it here. Some bad Dostoyevsky jokes for children? Which one is the best representation? April 20, P. I read this combined edition but reviewed the works separately; my review for The Double is here. View all 6 comments.

The narrator, the "anti-hero" who claims to be-- all we are just too self-deluded to be --spends his life destroying his life with contradictory outbursts. They are contradictory because first he assumes one pose, one that is, generally, judgmental, a point of view against his fellow men. Then he spends the next 6 hours regretting what he's done, plotting to undo it,berating himself, but ultimately only sowing confusion I cannot write.

Then he spends the next 6 hours regretting what he's done, plotting to undo it,berating himself, but ultimately only sowing confusion and disdain for himself in those unfortunate enough to have entered his field of attention. Of course his victimsof his so called honest encounters-- maybe really do dredge up some truth that will allow them to see themselves in a better light, if for no other reason than in contrast to himself. I can't help thinking that this book seems more in line with what is traditionally seen as the epileptic's view of the world--a stark black and white morality, is what I've read, a hypersensitivity to criticism, both to the self and everyone else around the epileptic.

I have marveled that it didn't seem a part of his later famous novels, which are full of fine compassion for so many of his characters. But the "Underground Man" truly has a world view that is verging on paranoid, and exceptionally violent. One imagines him capable of almost anything. You want to warn the others away from him, as he will turn, even though he really means to turn on himself, the source of his real loathing.


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Generally, the narrator starts with a person who most likely is deserving of some contempt--a spoiled dandy of an aristocrat, a sarcastic prostitute--but, the abuse he heaps--much of it potentially truebecomes so outrageous and violent it completely flips the readers sympathy towards his target. One spends the story wishing for some moment, some ONE, to redeem him.

Once he has the other's "love" or sympathy or empathy or carehe then merely wants to feel triumph. This is not my definition of love, however the Underground Man would like to frame me as deluded.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky is excellent at creating gloomy and unstable male narrators that make following the story feel like you are solving a puzzle. I enjoyed the book thoroughly and it is hard to say which one of the novels, Notes from Underground or The Double, I liked more. Both of the stories were very dark stories with unreliable narrators; you could see how both of the narrators were sliding into madness slowly through the story, and you couldn't never tell if the details in the story were just Fyodor Dostoevsky is excellent at creating gloomy and unstable male narrators that make following the story feel like you are solving a puzzle.

Both of the stories were very dark stories with unreliable narrators; you could see how both of the narrators were sliding into madness slowly through the story, and you couldn't never tell if the details in the story were just from the mad imagination from narrator or the truth. That made the two novels a bit challenging to go through, but all in all, I really enjoyed these two novels and really recommend getting into this or other works of Dostoevsky because he is, indeed, excellent writer.

These novellas were my first ever Dostoyevsky reads, and it was an interesting and somewhat challenging experience. For this review, I will be reviewing each story individually. Notes from Underground - 4 stars. This novella was the one I wanted to read the most by Dostoyevsky. I always thought it sounded very interesting, although some people had told me it was challenging. It is narrated by an unnamed protagonist, a retired civil servant living in St. The novella is split i 3.

The novella is split into two parts; the first a sort of rambling memoir, the second a depiction of the events that led up to his current situation. The narrator deals with numerous topics such as human suffering and theories of reason and logic, amongst other things.

I enjoyed reading from the narrator's viewpoint, as although he was unreliable, he had an incredibly strong personality that really bounded off the page. He was so angry and stuck in his own ways and almost nihilistic in a way that sometimes I found his ramblings very funny. It goes without saying that I enjoyed the second part of this novella more, as there was an actual narrative of sorts, but I would definitely recommend this if you like philosophical fiction.

The Double - 3 stars. I had already seen the Richard Ayoade film adaptation of this novella earlier this year, and part of me wonders if I would have enjoyed it more if I had read this first. The protagonist, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, is a titular councillor who encounters a man who is his exact double. Although they initially begin being friends, Golyadkin soon sees his double infiltrate his way into his life, taking over everything and turning his colleagues against him.

I really enjoyed the premise of this novella, but I found it a little difficult to read at times. Sometimes there would not be a paragraph break for two pages, and I found the way the protagonist used other characters full names repeatedly in the same sentence quite irritating. Although I did enjoy the fact that the events in the novella were different from the film adaptation, I felt that I enjoyed the adaptation better as there was a great deal more drama, and more of a development in the characters' relationships.

Saying that, this was an enjoyable read, and one I would recommend. Jul 22, David Sarkies rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Lovers of dark literature. Two of Dostoyevski's shorter works 12 May I'm glad that I'm not the only person that found this book hard to follow at times, but since it is a collection of thoughts from a man who is trapped in his own feelings of self-worthlessness it is understandable. Dostoyevsky is a writer that one needs to be able to focus on to be able to read and understand clearly, if it is possible to clearly understand much of his writings.

It is not to say that he is not fpr he seems to be able to catch the ess Two of Dostoyevski's shorter works 12 May I'm glad that I'm not the only person that found this book hard to follow at times, but since it is a collection of thoughts from a man who is trapped in his own feelings of self-worthlessness it is understandable. It is not to say that he is not fpr he seems to be able to catch the essence of the human condition, particularly being a Russian living in the 19th century who spent time in the Russian Gulags.

The critics say that there is a distinct difference between Dostoyevsky's writings from before his time in the Gulag and afterwards. These two stories do capture that. However, The Double, which is the second story in this collection is about a man who is haunted by a younger double.

The Underground Man by MacDonald, Ross

I guess it is something that we all face as we grow up and begin to see the younger go getters beginning to take the kudos that we have been so used to receiving for so long. However, one needs to be able to balance the energy and drive of the youth with their lack of experience. While knowledge may be one thing, experience is something that adds to one's self-worth. Notes from Underground is April's read for the Existential Book Club, and is hailed by some as the first work of existential fiction.

It's a piece I really enjoyed, and especially the wit from the narrator's voice which I think strengthened the work. The use of unreliability was done very cleverly, and the narrator constantly second-guessed himself providing a really intricate perspective I would love to pick apart further. The first half of the story consists of the narrator introducing his posi Notes from Underground is April's read for the Existential Book Club, and is hailed by some as the first work of existential fiction. The first half of the story consists of the narrator introducing his position in 'the underground' and talking about the difference between he and other 'natural' men.

The second was the actual story, set twenty years earlier, and told of various episodes in his life where he was forced to confront his own existence. I think I preferred the first part of this text, just because I found it that more interesting in terms of philosophy, yet it still had the witty narration in it. I guess it takes a few rereads to fully understand what he's trying to say which was my only real problem with it, as well as trying to understand what he means by 'natural'. But overall, a good read and I'm really impressed with my first Dostoyevsky. The Double completely messed me up.

I was so close to giving this five stars, because it was a terrifying yet addictive read at the same time. It is the story of a man who sees his double - a doppelganger who is able to be confident and excel in areas of life that he fails. I'm so interested in the idea of doubling, doppelgangers and twins, and so this story was such a great thing for me to read. I thought the use of the word 'hero' was interesting and drew attention to the fact that the narrator was more of an 'anti hero'. The way the narrator loses control was done cleverly through the narrative, and led to a terrifying end.

Basically, I loved this. It was amazing, creepy and I'm obsessed with it. I've only read Notes from Underground for class, so my review is restricted to that: I immediately enjoyed this book more than Crime and Punishment. Maybe I should go back and read that again sometime to see if the distance of years and not being forced to choke through it would help, but that's beside the point.

Dostoyevsky really impressed me with this one. The character is so well fleshed out and he's such a cranky, arrogant jerk it's hard not to laugh as he spews all his opinions like a grump I've only read Notes from Underground for class, so my review is restricted to that: The character is so well fleshed out and he's such a cranky, arrogant jerk it's hard not to laugh as he spews all his opinions like a grump and verbally slays the rest of mankind for their stupidity. All the world is beneath him, it seems, and it's actually rather amusing.

Add to that that I could actually relate to him at times oddly enough when he's discussing his awkwardness in social situations, panicking about what he has said or didn't say to someone, and his overall back and forth between wanting to be around people and hating them, wishing for "peace. It is a little rough getting through the first part because it's mostly just him spewing his opinions about things, but I still found it rather enjoyable. It was a good way to get to know the character, I think. Overall, I liked it despite it.

The Underground Man

If that makes any sense. Aug 08, Lady Jane rated it it was amazing. This book was a journey through the darkest crevices of the human mind, truly ahead of its time and a predecessor of Freud.

I read this book twelve years ago, so it was nice to reacquaint myself with Dostoevsky's dark humor now with more life experience. At first I thought the narrator is the classic portrait of an introvert because he loves being alone in his allegorical underground cave so much, but this guy goes beyond that in self hatred and misanthropy. Nevertheless, his level of self aware This book was a journey through the darkest crevices of the human mind, truly ahead of its time and a predecessor of Freud.


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  4. Nevertheless, his level of self awareness is fascinating as he exposes trains of thought that most would deny having even to themselves. I liked the first part much more than the second because he goes into detail about man's nature and such, whereas the second part is just him relating personal anecdotes with some failed friendships and his misanthropic reactions. However, the entire work is in itself very quotable. A classic in pathological psychology!