Book Review: Notes From Underground

A Trip to Delululand

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is a quick book that runs under a hundred pages. Using the framing device of excerpts from someone’s memoirs, the book takes us through a snippet of their life where we follow them through… something.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know what happens in this book. I don’t think anything happens in this book outside the narrator’s head.

Narrator probably has one of these.

The first section is the owner’s philosophical ravings about human suffering, utopia, and being alive, which boils down to “people enjoy the chase for things more than the things themselves”, which I find to hold some merit. What this really cements in my mind, though, is that nothing is going to happen in this book because it is a treatise.

The second section ostensibly describes some events from the narrator’s life. The thing is, our narrator’s commentary takes up more than half of the words. This is a man who believes it appropriate to insult a former schoolmate in the middle of a friendly dinner at one of their homes, leap up and pace between the dining table and the kitchen, all while loudly insisting in his own mind that he is PAYING THEM NO MIND and BEING PERFECTLY CONCILIATORY. He will then proceed to run thoughts at full speed for a paragraph – righteous indignation at being called to the reunion and humiliated for his low-paying job, regret at his surprising outburst, cope that if he just makes a good enough argument, everyone will change their mind and agree with him – all of this at the expense of narrating what actually happened.

The same occurs when he later plays Captain Save-a-Hoe and tries to talk a respectable lady of the night out of her profession and into marrying him. It kind of works and she follows him home, only to realize he’s a loser and ditch. At least that’s what I was able to read, I think the lady was just going along for the ride to see where this crazy guy was going with this.

Also our narrator. Check out the comic this is from here.

This constant live editorializing of life reminds me of a streamer, GoPro strapped to their head and narrating their life for public consumption. The memoir is written as if the man is making a stream of his life, commenting in all his words and thoughts for posterity and to “correct the record”, rather than being able to tell the story of his own foolish actions and laugh about it. Every wound he has ever suffered in his life is still fresh, and it shows.

This also made the book a cringy and painful read for me – I’ve already attempted to read it once and dropped it because life got in the way, but on a second time, it was a funny, cringy trip to Delululand. I highly recommend it. The insanity and schizoposting are 10/10, and I imagine Dostoyevsky had a laugh riot writing it.

Moral of the story: Do not simp. Do not be something you’re not. Do not be a passive-aggressive undergrounder who epically owns people on Reddit with killshots.