John A.A. Logan's 3 favorite reads in 2023

I had read most of Dostoyevsky’s other novels twenty-five years ago. I decided then to save up this book for a rainy day. 

The Brothers Karamazov is on a vaster scale than Dostoyevsky’s other novels, less concentrated along one line of supreme intensity. And yet, all the power still bursts forth, in moments where the innards of the characters seem to explode outward, penetrating the reader’s soul. It is hard not to be conscious of the fact that Dostoyevsky wrote this novel following the death of his own three-year-old son. The novel seems to constitute a re-piecing-together of the author’s mind, and, as this was his last book, a final statement on life and death, love and loss.

The book holds a colossal power, quantum neutron-star-like depths wrestling crazily on the page, but underlying that, the restraint still of a great and overwhelming sense of order in the things of this world, a faith in that underlying web that holds everything in place as we live among its strands, and not always trapped either in the role of fly or spider, but capable perhaps, in Dostoyevsky’s eyes, of more. 

The closest person to me in the world, before she died, gave me a copy of this book, several years ago. I eyed the copy in my house, waiting until I felt ready to read it. I had only read Vonnegut once before, nearly forty years ago.

This book surprised me with its linguistic lightness of touch and beautiful playfulness. There is a cumulative power in the storytelling, crescendoes of pyrotechnic virtuosity, and an underlying solemnity and fatality in dealing with mortality or the occasional weird transcendence of it in time and space.

I kept experiencing the book as a form of letter from my lost loved one, as her mind had travelled through those pages before mine, and she had given me that physical copy, wishing my mind to travel across those pages too. It has left me wanting to read more Vonnegut.

As Vonnegut’s Harmonium's sing on the cave walls, "Here I am, here I am, here I am." With their reply to each other, "So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are." Thank you, Deb, wherever you are out there, for giving me this book, and much else. 

I had never read Nabokov before, so this book was my introduction to the alternating concentrated power and playfulness at work here. There is a great, underlying seriousness to this investigation of the evils and individual-crushing machinations of a dystopian, totalitarian State.

At moments the story and prose rushes with an emotionless coldness, only to be re-balanced by the self-sacrificing love of father for son. There is a deep humanity in the book; alongside a terrible and pitiless exposure of the inhumane. The language and storytelling are startlingly original and uncompromising, right from the very beginning.

Krug, and his adversary, Paduk, "The Toad", make a fascinating human aspect to this story of a country’s descent into authoritarian nightmare and insanity. Even at the darkest moments, the exquisite beauty of thought and language here offers the characters a last escape from Hell, even if only by means of a Heaven-sent beam of light leading along a road to merciful madness. The "Ekwilist" philosophy and the goals of "The Party of the Average Man" must crush all dissent, and bribe all opposition out of existence, or else how can the world and universe ever be forced successfully to take on the contours of The Party’s own dull, grey, Toad-like image?

In the end, creator-Nabokov can take no more, though, and steps in to rescue his creation, Krug, aborting the reality of his project while in no way compromising its supreme aesthetics. And all the while, the story retains its powerful resistance to the humourless dystopian shadow-void that always threatens to subsume the Light.

It seems that, finally, Nabokov is warning us we are at the threshold always of a Mental Prison, and attempts here to show us the way to the tunnel or key by which we might, with effort of our own, obtain escape and thwart the forces of darkness, at least until dusk returns next. Nabokov’s incandescent brilliance of language becomes a weapon itself, against the shadows and specters threatening to cram in and suffocate us on all sides.