The other day someone online posted a passage from The Brothers Karamazov and that made me remember how rooked I felt by the cover of the paperback copy my grandpa brought home from his lowly job at Pocket Books.
Yul Brynner smouldering and Maria Schell looking lusciously tarty, but the inside was an amazing amount of whining about God and just a little bit of parricide (that part I liked).
And now all I can think of is the scene from The Producers where Zero Mostel pours water on Gene Wilder to stop him from being hysterical.
The Russian masters never moved me. (Russian masters did move most of my family to flee the collapsing Empire but that’s another story.)
My grandpa brought home The Son Avenger too.
I liked the austere power of its cover illustration, though I don’t think I thought of those words then, and the story was a little hard to follow as the final volume of a tetralogy.
But clear was the protagonist’s guilt and anguish in feeling he’d separated himself from God—his desperate loneliness, believing his wife to be little more than a sweet near half-wit incapable of understanding that, and learning only while she lay dying that she’d comprehended him all the way back from the start.
He’d killed for his woman twice—for her and her family’s honor—and never known who his woman was, he’d given her his duty but denied her the respect of a whole heart’s love.
I only learned fairly recently that some of the authors whose works were most important to me and the things I think about are, like Dostoevsky, known as moral philosophers. I wasn’t reading them for their big ideas. I just loved their stories.
And a very strange thing—I found a copy of A Raw Youth on my bookshelf a few years ago (it hadn’t been bought by me) and started reading it, for some reason I can’t remember, and I thought the voice was great.
I wish Grandpa’d brought that one home.