The Eternal Husband And Other Stories - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This is another one of those books that I ordered as a step forth in my attempt to complete Dostoyevsky's works. The name of the primary story was somewhat intriguing and Dostoyevsky is always a good bet. Hence I ordered it without much thought. The book turned out to have five short stories, two of which ("Bobok" and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man") I had already covered in another compilation. The other three, I read with relish.

A very short note about Dostoyevsky's writing in this book : the translators has chosen a set of stories that focused on Dostoyevsky's idea of the "underground" man. Since I have read only the "underground" stories of Dostoyevsky, I am unable to comprehend a difference. But the stories do seem to have his usual essence (reading the introduction might make this point clearer).

The first story, "A Nasty Anecdote", talks of an "actual state councillor" Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky who holds the belief that humaneness can bring the people of Russia together and that is the only way diplomats can be popular among general folks. He debates this with a few friends over drinks and managing to get drunk, on his walk back home tries to make himself an object of an anecdote by going to attend the wedding celebrations of a junior in his department so that people could recount stories of how he "embraced morally" people below his rank. Things do not go as expected and at the end of a scandalous dinner, Ivan Pralinsky manages to make himself an object of a nasty anecdote instead.

The Eternal Husband is the story of the meeting of a cuckolded middle aged man and his wife's erstwhile lover. This lover, Velachinov, is the protagonist of this story and the other "eternal husband" looks up to him despite all the spite. It is mutual hatred and contention over their loved ones that leads to multiple meetings between the two. Each trying to justify himself to the other.

The third new story in this book : The Meek One, is the ramblings of a husband standing over the corpse of his wife who jumped out of the window. They are he ramblings that explain his distress at finding himself alone once more. He accuses himself; accuses her; looks for ways to justify her acts. But his pain is evident at the loss of one he loved and for whom he had agreed to change.

All three stories were very interesting. I specially liked "The Meek One" more than the others because of the rambling nature of the story. It was nothing more than the mindless babble of a widower. But it was very beautifully portrayed. I will resume my Dostoyevskian journey after a short break now.

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

I had picked up Flaubert long back. I must have been freshly out of my final year or into my first job. Among a few others that included Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Flaubert's Madame Bovary got picked into my shopping cart and since then had lay collecting dust on the shelves back home. It was probably the lady on the cover page that had caught my eye. But it was certainly a feeble memory of having heard about the novel somewhere that made me buy it. But I was in no hurry to start off with the book. Hence the long wait.

On the face of it, Madame Bovary looks like any other classic. But it is a pleasant surprise when mid way through the book you realise that you have not been bored as often as you had expected to be. Flaubert is exceptionally good at creating scenes and, of course, stories. His stories run into each other giving a sense of continuity that is often missing in other classics. There are no "fillers". That coupled with the exceptional character portrayal of the protagonist and her husband make Flaubert exceptional in my opinion.

The story is primarily about the boredom that plagues the middle class household. A certain Charles Bovary romances and marries a certain Emma, the daughter of one of his patients. This Emma Bovary, protagonist of the story henceforth, is a starry eyed girl when we first meet her. Gradually, she realises that all her dreams of a glamourous life are too far out of the reaches of her husband. She gets bored immensely in his household while he is beatific in his settled life. She starts hating her husband, she indulges in adultery, running after anyone and anything that holds even a remote promise of something other than her life while the unsuspecting cuckolded man continues his life just the same.

Flaubert was exceptional in the way he built his characters. All were very real and very believable. There was nothing in the story that could be called fantastic. But the way Flaubert grips his readers with such limited exaggeration is very creditable. He is certainly one author I would like to read more of.