Currently Reading, Intermezzo Edition

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils
(I am intentionally abstaining from Pevear and Volokhonsky translations as I make my way back through Dostoevsky.)
I read this one in grad school and it left no stamp on my memory. It's not hard to see why it didn't: it seems designed to deliver the plot through the most circuitous route possible. Large parts of the novel are just dialogue. The story is told by a narrator who occasionally spoils everything that is about to happen before the action begins. The first 300 or so pages involve a set of characters who then disappear from the narrative. It feels, perhaps, like a Fathers and Sons-style novel that morphed into something quite different, but instead of discarding the unneeded narrative scaffolding, it all remained. The murder is at the beginning of Crime and Punishment and in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov; it may just be a case in which Dostoevsky is a better observer of the consequences of actions than the causes of them; that might be his version of Tolstoy wanting to be a novelist of big ideas but actually being a novelist of small details.
But there was a time when this was the thing I cared about most in a novel: the articulate and detailed exploration of ideas through dialogue. I think back to my own attempts at writing fiction and it occurs to me that I was discouraged many times for two things that resonated with me and were (and are still, kinda) deeply out of step with the reading public: dialogue about ideas and very, very long sentences. Everybody hates a long sentence, unless they win you a Nobel Prize or unending literary fame. 

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
It's no Beautiful World, Where Are You? but it's pretty good, halfway through. I think I have landed on the thing I like about Rooney that seems to annoy the people who dislike her: there's a baseline conviction in all of her books that there's something beautiful about life and the world that's worth noticing and appreciating. Many things in life can be hard, but the effort is worth it because there is something good that no human action can completely obscure.

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or I
I mean, the hits are the hits for a reason: "Diapsalmata" still goes, as does "The Rotation of Crops". I could do without 100 pages on a play that doesn't get performed anymore, but the central argument about Don Giovanni is an interesting one. "The Diary of a Seducer" is... I wonder if I would have read it differently had it been assigned as part of my Existentialism course in undergrad. From 2026 he looks very unappealing. But one is somewhat inclined to expect that's the point: Don Giovanni can be somewhat blameless because his seduction is (so A argues) of the moment and just because he's taken away by a whim; the Seducer is plotting and this has to bring an ethical dimension in. But one gets this sense from the other essays, as well: they tend to be arguments that undermine themselves at least a little because no human being can sustain a perfectly aesthetic point of view; we're ethical creatures and we need ethics.