Six Years of Mostly About Stories

I started Mostly About Stories towards the end of January, 2019, which makes it about six years old and provides the excuse for this post. I’ll cover some things I did this year, some writing I’ve done, and the statistics.

If you want to know what I’ve read and enjoyed this year, you can check out the updated All Posts page.

Personal

This past year I moved to Germany, where hopefully, employers willing, I will remain for the next year or two. For various reasons, primarily interrail tickets and the German Deutschlandticket, which gives me unlimited travel on all non-long-distance public transport at a very reasonable price, I have been quite busy travelling about. I’ve seen the Black Forest, Berlin, Hamburg and Luebeck, Copenhagen, Vienna, Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, Amsterdam, Tessel, Norderney, Utrecht, Maastricht, Aachen and Muenster. Of these, I do regret that after visiting Heidegger’s cottage in Todtnauberg the blog post on him never materialised. Another time. 

Compared to Russia, Germany is not very exciting. Still, I cannot say I’m not glad to be in a location where war seems unthinkable. While my German is reasonably good and improving daily, it’s challenging to integrate fully where I am, though I am working on it. Mostly, I end up with my co-workers. I would say the atrophy of my Russian has been halted by having many colleagues from that part of the world, while my Ukrainian has improved, now I have a friend here so crazy about a certain vision of her country that she has a trident stuck on her arm. Progress on my Polish is not good enough for my girlfriend, especially when I am learning Ukrainian over it, which even Ukrainians like to tell me is useless to me. Still, we get there too, slowly.

When I wrote my Three Years of Mostly About Stories post, I was struggling with combining work and reading, to say nothing of the writing I wasn’t doing. The company I was with didn’t know what to do with me, my immigration status in Russia felt precarious, and I was living under the shadow of a war that, it turned out, really was imminent.

Now I can say with some confidence that things have never been so good. I have a flat within walking distance of work, with green spaces nearby, and friends around. I actually have friends, where moving to Moscow was merely entering a vortex of potentiality. Work is fine – I am finishing up a graduate scheme so I get to try a variety of things to really work out what it is I want to be doing – and I get paid well. As noted, I’ve done lots of travelling. But the main thing is that I have finally sorted out the writing.

Writing

Mostly About Stories is a bit of fun and I hope readers treat it as such. The real thing is to become a writer of great fiction. To do that, I must first become a writer of fiction. At school I wrote a novel, which after paying an editor to go through, was picked up by an agent. I then, being about sixteen, got bored, feeling I was improving so fast that there was no point bothering with that old work. This was a mistake, obviously, but whatever. At university, I used to reach a boil of inspiration where suddenly things would spill over and I’d spend a weekend neglecting my studies and spewing out a short story. These I was proud of, and ultimately self-published on Amazon for a few friends to buy. A little later, I took it down.

Even with those bright spots, I struggled to write. I wrote and was immediately disheartened by the words, which meant I ended up producing blank pages rather than drafts that could later be improved. War and Peace, a novel I hold in high esteem, and which seems supremely natural, was actually redrafted and line-edited something like ten times. Perhaps only Goethe could get perfection the first time round, but plenty of people have produced things which in the end were even better, and all because they did not give up on what they started. This was not me: I produced neither perfection nor imperfection, unless we count the blank page perfection, and I am not into that kind of game.

After graduating, I did write the odd story, but given I spent vast amounts of time unemployed thanks to a certain autocrat, I was not making the most of my time. Writers get better by writing, they often say. There might be more to it than that, but it’s a good starting point, and one I wasn’t much aligned with. For various reasons, but primarily this incessant self-criticism, I got nowhere. It was also a little disturbing that I had no “ideas” for a novel. Any amateur will find it’s fairly easy to come up with great ideas – the family saga, the modernised War and Peace, etc – but it soon becomes apparent that these overarching ideas must be broken down into little ideas, little narratives, or they will not be possible to write at all. It wouldn’t even be akin to building the skeleton of a house – it would be like putting up the walls without the corners, and watching them fall over at the first gust. It’s the little ideas, the observations that sparkle on each page, that make a novel great – great ideas for overarching stories are easy, as ultimately there’s less originality there than you might think.

Anyway, this idea that is absolutely central to my idea of my own self – that I am a writer, must be a writer – was finding little justification in reality. Until this year, round about the half way part.

I resolved it in two ways. The first solution arose last summer, when for the first time I had an idea for a “novel”. Something more modest and practical than the ideas above. On its own, that was no salvation. But I was also helped by technology. I went and bought a small folding phone stand and a Bluetooth keyboard. Unlike with my laptop, where I could always tab-out to something else, with a phone if you are in the writing app it’s harder to leave. This simple technological adjustment made it possible to write by lowering the barrier of entry and raising the barrier to exit. Rather than forcing myself with great effort to sit down in front of my computer, only to write a few words that disgusted me, and then immediately switch to some tab or video that would entertain me, here I could write with almost no effort at all. From bed, on a cramped train, lying on a sofa, and so on. Because phones have smaller screens, there was also only so much neurotic re-reading I could do. I just had to accept what I’d written, and move on.

The result was a novel. 114’000 words – some good, some definitely not – with a beginning, middle, end, and characters who were, at least when you squinted, recognisably human. Also, gladly, it was not a work that was “semi-autobiographical”, a phrase that always makes my stomach churn. This was and is, absolutely, something to be proud of. I had made something come into existence that only I could have done.

But once it was done, in this first draft, I realised I still could not write anything else. Inspiration is great, but clearly unreliable. At a given moment, I’ve got a couple of things I want to write, but not necessarily so desperately that I must write them. Not enough to go back to that same method, anyway.

A second revolution was needed, one that was far simpler. I adjusted my routine. I am something of a control-maniac, and one of the joys of my life in Germany is that I have my own flat and life here. Initially, I planned each day to get up a little before 8, then from 8:05 to 8:25 I did my morning routine (shower, bathroom, clothes, etc), before leaving at around 8:27 to ensure I arrived at work at 8:57 and in time for any 9:00 meetings. I had imagined that, when I came home each day, I could then have “half” of the day to myself. This was delusional. I was not tired, but I was tired enough that this was not leading to the results I wanted. Yes, I might read, but certainly I was not going to sit down and write.

I have always had struggles with sleeping, though not proper insomnia or anything that might lead to wacky fiction. In the autumn I was waking up regularly at say six and unable to get back to sleep easily, so I decided one day to have a go just getting up then. Combined with my morning cup of matcha, I found I had something functional. I still got ready to leave at 8:27 and kept my alarms in place, but instead those alarms were not reminding me to leave bed, but rather to finish up my writing. Now, I woke up around six forty with no alarm (having also moved my bedtime an hour earlier), got up, made my matcha, and sat down to write. I then wrote until the alarms forced me to get ready for work.

So far this method has been in operation for a few months. Not every day has been a success, but I would say the clear majority of mornings find me doing this. No matter how rubbish the words are, I get them down, between 500 and 1000 of them. I then head away to work, knowing that however badly I spend the rest of my time, my day has been no failure.

These are promising developments in the life of a writer. It is impossible for me to say whether the quality has improved, or will improve, with this system. We might also question whether writing in this way forces me to produce things that are less cohesive compared to the several thousand words I might write in a single day when the inspiration pressure cooker was exploding back at Cambridge. But at least I am writing. I have no particular desire to be published at this stage, so I am happy just to get drafts on the page, for further editing and examination down the line. I have a well-paying bourgeois job – I’m no starving writer desperately trying to see things in the papers. This gives me the luxury of writing as much as I want and whatever I want, before I actually start trying to make money off it.

Mostly About Stories is just a blog about the books that I’ve been reading, and will not contain my fiction as a matter of principle, though thematic interests may be shared between work “off the blog” and the work that does go on the blog. Thinking aloud is nice, but so is thinking on paper. Borges used to ask why he should write a book of five hundred pages when he could write a book review for this imaginary book and get it all down in five. I am no Borges, but writing the review first, then the novel itself, may not be a bad way to go in terms of learning thematic focus.

While I do not want to share my fiction on the blog (ewww…), readers who think they might be interested in reading and providing feedback should certainly get in touch.

Stats

There’s inevitably little visibility on the amount of views that literature blogs get, and I cannot see much harm in sharing my own. Last year I had a significant increase in views. I have no idea why but I cannot complain. I’ve also had interesting comments. Really that’s all I can ask for. If you are reading, thanks.

Conclusion

Anyway, it appears to have been a good year. I have entered 2025 reading more, writing more, and getting better at the things that matter. Now all I need is a permanent position at work, and things will be sehr gut indeed.

Vasily Grossman – Life and Fate

Life and Fate is so good I almost can’t write about it. Despite its concentration camps, its scenes in the Gulag and the death camps, the interrogations in Lubyanka and all the deaths coming so early for characters we want to live forever, the tears that came to my eyes while reading were tears of joy – and when I punched the air it was not with rage but as a spontaneous expression of awe at the work’s titanic mastery. In quite important ways, it does more than War and Peace. But Life and Fate is not an epic like that work; rather, it is its negative.

An epic creates myths; Grossman destroys them. Tolstoy’s work created ideas of Napoleon and the War of 1812 which remain sticky to this day even as he tried to destroy the idea of the “Great Man” shaping history. The central ideologies of the mid-20th century, Nazism and Stalinism, also aimed at mythmaking – the Thousand Year Reich, the October Revolution. Life and Fate annihilates these myths while still retaining the hallmarks of the epic form – a vast canvas, a willingness to philosophise, and the detached tone of a writer who sits beside God. It’s probably one of the best books I have read – or ever will.

This idea of Life and Fate as an anti-epic, or perhaps alternatively as an epic of humanism, is one way to approach the book. I wrote about Grossman’s earlier Stalingrad, which I read immediately before Life and Fate (together they must be a little longer than Tolstoy’s book), within the context of truth-telling. But if that book, written under Stalin’s last years, attempted to push truth through the gaps in the censors’ red ink, Life and Fate instead tells it straight out. The reading experience is vastly improved as a result, with characters humanised by their ability to experience such feelings as doubt or a desire for infidelity. But we might also say that if we were dutiful Soviet citizens we needed both works to experience their full impact – Stalingrad to begin weakening our trust in the regime’s narrative, and Life and Fate to replace its totalising narrative with many individual ones.

The two works share a core cast of characters, centring around the Shaposhnikov family. There are limited physical overlaps in this work as it begins with them scattered where in Stalingrad they were initially together, but there are enough connections – even if it is just a character thinking of another – to make us feel as if we are observing a shared world. In a world at war, after all, people cannot be together. In my post on Stalingrad I called that work panoramic, with its vision stretching to miners in the Urals and the full range of Soviet citizens inhabiting the city of Stalingrad itself. Yet immediately upon reading Life and Fate I felt embarrassed at giving it that designation. To say something is panoramic is almost to close the book and say that we don’t need any more voices – it’s a statement that mutes others.

In Life and Fate we hear many of these voices that are lost. There’s Karimov, a Tatar intellectual who cries over the murder of so many of his people’s brightest stars in the early years of the Soviet Union; there’s Kristya, the Ukrainian peasant woman who lost her family during the Holodomor yet saves the Russian soldier Semyonov from starvation; there’s Abarchuk, trapped in the Gulag. Grossman, with a bravery that is hard to appreciate from here, names everything evil that he can. Whether Gulag or death camp (and he was among the first to reach Treblinka), mass deportation (of the Crimean Tatars and others), the arbitrary famines during collectivisation, the mass murders of innocents in 1937, or just the lies of Russian nationalism and the pervasive Soviet anti-Semitism, in Life and Fate we have a kind of record of it. Akhmatova, in her Requiem, regretted that she could not name all the victims of The Terror by name. Grossman, it feels, gets pretty damn close.

In Stalingrad, the Germans were portrayed in a way that left the perceptive reader aware that Grossman’s criticisms against them could easily be reflected back to the Soviets. Here, we are explicit. SS Officer Liss tells the captured old revolutionary Mostovskoy that they are basically one in the same. Later we might find another parallel – Mostovskoy expects to be tortured during questioning, but it is commissar Krymov who is tortured instead – and by his own people in Moscow. Through the story of Viktor Shturm, the novel’s Jewish hero, we see the arbitrariness of state power. At first he is praised for his scientific discoveries, but then the political mood changes and Shturm finds himself cast out of his job. A few weeks later and Stalin decides he doesn’t want to be behind on building a nuclear bomb and Shturm’s fortunes are restored yet again.

Yet if this work were only negative, only critical, it would be miserable. Dismissing that world – the world of the Soviet Union in the years of the war against Hitler – too readily is itself an evil. A lot of people died to defeat Hitler, far more than perhaps needed to, but in many cases those people volunteered quite readily to defend their homelands against invasion. During the war they displayed great strength and fortitude. There were heroes among them, even if their state was not always playing the role of hero. Grossman’s love for the defenders of Stalingrad is real. The defence of the city itself was, at least in part, truly epic. But where Stalingrad ends with a celebration of that very heroism, Life and Fate as usual goes further. One of the most chilling parts of the book is the growing menace we perceive as the Soviet authorities realise they have the Germans on the back foot. It is at that point that the state decides it is time to exact its revenge, and all those fates which had seemed so positive are turned to ashes under the Stalinist, KGB gaze.

In such a nuanced view of the war, Grossman differs significantly from Tolstoy, who is both mentor and rival in Grossman’s two novels. One thing I noticed rereading it at the beginning of last year was how naïve, how sentimental War and Peace seems, how disgusting even the light nationalism of its later parts is. The Russian soul is not the hero of Life and Fate, unless that soul means the desire for a people to defend its homes. In War and Peace, ultimately, we have some delightful aristocrats who are trying to work out how to live, with the war just providing some novel opportunities for engaging with a problem which is ultimately mainly a concern for a man or woman of money, leisure, and time for reflection.

Life and Fate is concerned with a much more pressing matter, one that comes long before we can start thinking about how to live in the Tolstoyan sense. That concern is how to survive, how to live under totalitarianism pressure, how to protect the self from a state and society that are attempting at every stage to enchain or annihilate it. This is not a concern that is any less relevant now, even if many of us are less at risk of getting shot. Simply put, it is about human dignity and its preservation.

This is something we like to say, or used to like to say, about the great writers of Russia’s nineteenth century. Tolstoy celebrates the peasant, but ended up in later years having vitriol for the aristocrat or bourgeois. The Ukrainian Gogol celebrated the little man, but only so long as he was Russian. Against Dostoevsky we can let Karimov speak, who says “I’m a Tartar who was born in Russia and I cannot pardon a Russian writer his hatred of Poles and Yids.” Dostoevsky might tell us interesting things about people, but dignity is not part of it. Who then do we have?

The answer, for Grossman, is Chekhov, whose understated style we also see in Life and Fate with its short chapters and almost entirely dislocated impressionistic stories. Here is why, according to another one of the characters:

“Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness – with people of every estate, every class, every age… More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people – a Russian democrat. He said – and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings!” People were themselves before they were their identities, regardless of these identities – ethnic, religious, material. Of all the Russian writers Chekhov is the one whose project to care and depict was not led off course by ideas about how the world should be. Or, as he famously said himself “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

The spirit of Chekhov infuses this book, and it is because of this spirit that Life and Fate feels impossibly modern in the same way that Chekhov himself does. We judge the characters – Grossman doesn’t do that, he just depicts them. Grossman instead judges the powers and ideas that put characters into the positions they are in, where they show their best and worst sides. Because the book is dedicated to social justice in the most serious sense of that phrase, and because the world it shows is so manifestly unjust, we can’t help but agree with him about what’s going wrong, while still standing in awe at all of the people and faces he somehow manages to fit in.

In a time of war, in the very same places as described in Life and Fate, and with the same peoples in the trenches but now on different sides, this book is more important than ever. Written in Russian by a Jewish writer from Ukraine, with its central hero a Jewish man from Ukraine, this is a great novel of tolerance, of pluralism, of dignity. In the war we have now, where nationalist tempers are high on both sides, nuance denied, and memory readily distorted for political aims, Grossman’s book, more than any other I have read, shows the kind of spirit we all need to have to build a lasting peace, for all the people who live in these lands.   

But first, I suppose, there’s more killing.

Correcting our Idea of Genius – Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

I am something of a Thomas Bernhard fanatic. After Woodcutters, the other Bernhard on this blog, I had a break until late 2023, when I read, in quick succession, Concrete, The Loser, Extinction, and Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard is a writer who is addictive in a quite unique way. His books are propelled by the bile and bitterness of his narrators and are inescapable thanks to their flowing, paragraphless prose, which offers no exit for someone looking to put them down and take a break. Entering Bernhard’s world means a total surrender to his aims and approach.

Correction, which I have now read for the second time, is to my mind the best Bernhard, and one of my favourite books altogether. It has a unique structure for the author, with two narrators, (even though one filters the other,) who take equal sides of the novel for themselves and who have slightly different voices. It also has the most interesting readerly experience, in that the novel’s journey is primarily one where we change our opinion about its central character, the genius scientist Roithamer, rather than one where something happens. All happening takes place before the book begins.

As with all Bernhard, the story itself is simple. Roithamer, a genius of sorts who works at Cambridge, upon the death of his parents inherits a lot of money and decides to use this money to build a Cone in the centre of the Kobernausser Forest in Austria for his sister to live in. Once the Cone is finished his sister dies, probably not of joy, and Roithamer then hangs himself. Our narrator, a friend of Roithamer’s, arrives at the house of a mutual friend, Hoeller, where Roithamer did much of his work on the Cone, to start putting Roithamer’s literary remains in order. The first part of Correction is an almost hagiographic portrayal of Roithamer by this friend; the second is Roithamer’s own literary remains, partly filtered. Chief among them is a manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone”.

In the first part of the book Roithamer is presented as a classical genius – what Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein is entirely appropriate here: “he was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Roithamer is totally focused in a way that few of us ever are: “a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end”. The ultimate end, it turns out, is suicide, but before we get to suicide, this thinking is inspirational. Roithamer builds a Cone for habitation, something nobody has done before, and does so totally professionally, as the result of massive research and effort, and all this in the face of all manner of criticisms and accusations of madness.

He is also totally himself, totally dedicated. Quite frankly, I would rather be like this – more pedantic, more unbearable, more focused, than any of the human qualities those who know me would wish I had in greater quantities to balance out my already well-developed inhuman ones. Almost all I could think as I read these sections was how much I agreed with everything, how much I myself wanted to build my own Cone, or rather in my case a Cube, a white glass cube but also in the centre of a forest or failing that atop a cliff and far away from everything and everybody, my own “thought-chamber” where I would be able to work totally undisturbed and think better, cleaner, wiser thoughts than anywhere else. A place where I would experience the same joy as I had recently in the crypt at the cathedral in Münster, where I was alone beside silent stone.

We see Roithamer’s genius reflected in Bernhard’s prose. It flows, in long sentences, with a focus on choosing the right words. One of the things I love, you’ll have noticed, is Bernhard’s italics. He uses italics to make us read words and phrases we might otherwise pass over. Strangely, simple though it is, it works. But there are also the neologisms, obviously more brilliant in the original German where they can remain a single word, things like the “thought-chamber” above. This sentence-by-sentence genius can also be drawn out to the wider book, where we are constantly becoming more precise, more accurate, more truthful in our various assertions.

Here is an example. On page 1 we learn that Roithamer has killed himself. On page 53 we learn the location, on page 61 we learn the method, on page 81 we learn who found him. The whole book is structured like a spiral, as we constantly correct our initial view to be closer to the reality that once was. Spirals can mean madness, of course, the sense of one being trapped. But they can also be like drill bits, precisely what is needed to make a hole through something – some challenge or problem – otherwise impenetrable. That is the great test of genius and obsession – to fixate upon the right thing, not the wrong. I have a friend whose longtime obsession is Pokémon Pearl. I, fortunately, am more obsessed by books and terrible questions.

Our narrator’s obsession is Roithamer himself. This is, he notes, not exactly healthy. He describes being unable to think his own thoughts, because he is incarcerated “within Roithamer’s thought-prison – or Roithamer’s thought-dungeon.” This, naturally, makes the depiction of Roithamer we receive in the first part of the book slightly suspect. It also provides one of the novel’s mysteries. For the second part is a collection of Roithamer’s thoughts, as filtered through the narrator, yet the narrator is nowhere to be found. Even though he claims they were friends who went to school together, Roithamer doesn’t mention him once. In fact, Roithamer provides information that directly contradicts the narrator’s testimony. (The narrator claims Roithamer visited Stocket to see him, whereas Roithamer claims he visited Stocket to see an uncle).

The result of the narrator’s obsession is that he essentially goes mad, helped by working in quite literally the same room as Roithamer when he worked on the Cone. He is almost subsumed into Roithamer. Arguably, the second part of the book, where Roithamer’s voice is even more dominant, is just an extension of this – the narrator is totally crushed as a human being with any more existence than merely that of a bridge between the dead man’s words and our ears. Yet interestingly, his admiration for Roithamer, his Roithamer-obsession, is quite similar to what I felt.

One of the ways that Correction provides a journey for the reader is that it takes that attitude and forces us to amend it. Once we hear Roithamer’s voice, unvarnished, the genius becomes rather more petty than godly. “That extraordinary talent for life” which the narrator so praises becomes in practice rather pathetic. Roithamer absolutely hated his upbringing on the estate of Altensam. He spends page after page criticising his brothers, his father, his mother in particular. He describes endless squabbles and confrontations in which he himself is the instigator. For example, it was enough for him to return home from abroad and find that a barn had been painted to send him off on a rampage.

Given that, like a lot of people on the spectrum or whatever, Roithamer has a real dislike of hypocrisy, the sheer amount that we find in him soon comes to undermine him. Nobody understands him, yes, but he claims to have been observing his sister for years and years to create the ultimate habitation for her in the form of a Cone. Yet the result of this observation is a home so comically unsuited that she dies pretty much immediately. The repetitions of these problems, Roithamer’s total lack of growth, and indeed the way that his entire personality seems to have come from his upbringing even though he claims to despise it, all makes him look rather ridiculous. He cries about people who “never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves,” but it is he who is the first person who should consider this.

Bernhard is a hugely funny writer, which I have failed to indicate here thus far, but humour is another way that our thought-image of Roithamer becomes covered in cracks. As Roithamer’s own suicide approaches, he reels off a whole host of family members who have committed suicide, in a way that is too over-the-top to be upsetting. “…They shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle. … And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems.” When we learn that one of these people literally threw themselves down the air shaft of a cheese factory our sympathy struggles to break through the snort of laughter at these words.

In fact, it is humour that keeps Roithamer alive. At one point he visits the cliff off from which one of his relatives threw himself and finds himself considering following suit, “but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there.” We laugh, perhaps, but three of Wittgenstein’s own brothers died to suicide, so these numbers are not the mad inflations they might seem. And Austria did, for a long time, have among the highest suicide rates in the world.

By the time Roithamer reaches the idea of suicide, the final “correction” for “our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature”, we are already no longer with him, but watching him, rather sadly, as the madman that others did claim he was. One of the key elements of cone-building, as we learn, is “statics”, basically how to keep things from falling over. In the case of Roithamer, this provides a beautiful metaphor. He tips and tips as far as he can into his thoughts, and done well he can make huge advances (as he does by building the Cone) without getting to a point where he loses his balance and falls over. But in the book, he does go too far, and hence falls. We, watching, do not.

Another key idea, understandably, is the idea of correction itself. Roithamer writes his manuscript about his childhood and then corrects it, making it much smaller and completely different, then does so again, then finally kills himself. Correction, when I reflected on it, really has two meanings or uses. It can mean to take something false and replace it with what is true, as in the case of an incorrect mathematical summation, or it can mean to take what is largely true and make it more precise. Correction abounds in the latter, but believes it is a tale of the former. One of the mesmerising beauties of Bernhard’s prose is its precision-fanaticism. Whether it’s denying one word in favour of another, “master builder” instead of “architect”, or its deployment of a huge number of words and phrases to create a more accurate picture than one or two alone could do, Correction aims at precision in a way that others might be willing to stop and say this is “good enough.”

Precision-fanaticism is another phrase for perfectionism. Nowadays, self-help gurus are all about the need to be less of a perfectionist, and Correction provides a dramatization of why we should heed them. Roithamer, finding error and inaccuracy everywhere, ultimately gives up on his connection to the source of all error – existence itself. For us, it need not be so. We can stop at a given sentence, just as I can give up on a given blog post, and say that this is good enough. Could be better, but won’t be. Thus we live to fight another day.

As much as this book ultimately becomes a criticism of Roithamer, indeed even a correction to our idea of genius, it remains mysterious to me because I am unable to shake my love of the ideas it represents and the way it represents them. Much as once upon a time I wanted to be Ivan Karamazov or Levin, I would want to be Roithamer if I could. At least the Roithamer that is represented in the novel’s first half. The Roithamer of the second, with his pettiness and pointless arguments with his family members, I fear I already am.

Where Bernhard is normally so negative and cruel that we normally come out of his books looking for things that might actually be affirmed in life, in Correction I actually heard something truly beautiful and admirable – the sheer, single-minded dedication to an arbitrarily chosen idea that we are willing to stake our entire soul upon. Yes, it’s mad, but I want to build my Cone. Better that than not wanting anything at all, and sinking into the grim mediocrity that Bernhard hates so much.