Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

The content of the three letters are a study in delirium. The kind of obsessive love that is self-flagellating. The indications point to her being in love with Agaia, but is it a physical attraction or an abstract one? Dostoyevsky suggests the latter, but I think it’s the former too. The time just did not permit such a taboo to be expressed so plainly.

Lebedev is a slime. A real snail of a man. And Myshkin tolerates him too readily.

…so despised. And admired. And he clearly sees that Natasya Filipovna is mad herself because of some deep repression in her soul. She’s in love with Aglaia, not the Prince. Yet these male suitors are madly chasing after her. There is so much angst in this work, and frankly, I love it. It teeters on melodrama but never quite submits to it. It plays like comedy but its laughs are cruelly and sadistically earned.

… that all people are essentially idiots in this world. Idiots and madmen. They hide shit from each other for fear of judgment. For fear of reprisal. For fear of being wrong. And still their venality shines through like an inborn spiritual quality. The Prince is supposedly the titular “idiot” but he’s really only an epileptic with a seriously good heart who can see into people’s souls. That’s why he is…

The Idiot is turning out to be a really fascinating book. The story is not really a story; that is, it’s not plot driven, but it’s so utterly compelling. There are scenes that go on for pages and pages with people drinking and jibing at each other till dawn and there are stories within stories that ramble way out of bounds of the main characters’ story. But it still hews tightly to a basic principle which is…

Ippolit’s “Explanation” seems to be the centerpiece of the novel. His account of his own innate inexplicable cruelty to humans weighed against his incredible kindness to other humans aptly demonstrates our own idiocy in this world. We want to obey’s God’s laws but their inscrutability makes it impossible. He’s the Idiot of the book in this instance, and his own botched suicide expresses this beautifully.