Author Archives: maxudov

A dazzling literary detective story

Dostoevsky, it must be said, was no saint. He was famously cantankerous; he had at least one affair during his unhappy first marriage; he was also ruinously addicted to roulette. But he had a brilliant mind, at ease with contradiction, and was determined to use literature to pursue the moral consequences of the ideas that defined his era. To do so, Dostoevsky took inspiration from the real life story of Pierre-François Lacenaire, a charismatic gentleman murderer whose trial had been the talk of Parisian society in the 1830s, fashioning the bones of his life into one of literature’s most compelling sinners: Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, a handsome, clever and often kind university student who nonetheless murders two defenceless old women with an axe.

The novel set Russian society ablaze on publication, with reviewers recognising it as a work of “unrivalled importance” written “with a truthfulness that shakes the soul”. (It was also prophetic: in late January 1866, just when the first chapters were being readied for publication, a law student named Danilov committed an almost identical crime.) But Crime and Punishment was no ordinary whodunnit. Instead, the book has been called a “whydunnit”, since the reader witnesses Raskolnikov’s crime in vivid detail almost immediately after the novel is under way. Throughout the story, there is a fatalistic sense that Raskolnikov cannot resist his guilt; if he is not caught, he will confess. The real question is: why? Even the murderer sometimes seems at a loss to explain his actions, and we sense that the final answer will expose the moral workings of his whole generation, who have fallen into the trap of utilitarianism, determined to found peaceful utopias by violent means.

We sense the answer will expose the moral workings of his generation who have fallen into the trap of utilitarianism

For modern readers, of course, a third question hovers behind the novel: how did Dostoevsky create a work of such ferocious conviction, whose impact was so immediate and marked? How could this man, who had fallen foul of the authorities but never for any violent crime, have published a novel that asks us to spend so much time inside the mind of a murderer? And can we ever account for works of genius, that so often appear to have sprung into the world fully formed? These are the central preoccupations of marvellous “howdunnit” The Sinner and the Saint by Kevin Birmingham, which intertwines the story of Raskolnikov’s conception with the life of his real life double, Lacenaire. It is the second book by Birmingham, whose 2014 cultural history of Ulysses was a New York Times bestseller and won the PEN New England and Truman Capote literary awards.

We first meet Dostoevsky starving in Wiesbaden, having gambled away all his money, writing frantic begging letters to friends, acquaintances and ex-lovers to pay off a hotel bill. His wife and older brother had recently died within months of each other, leaving Dostoevsky with crippling debts from the literary journal the brothers had started together. What was meant to be a relaxing writing trip had now turned into a harrowing attempt to avoid arrest. To distract himself from starvation he scribbled frantically in his notebook, hoping to write his way out of debt.

Remarkably, this wasn’t the absolute nadir of his life. Fifteen years earlier, at the age of 28, he had been subjected to the trauma of a mock execution before being sent to Siberia, a weeks-long journey in cold so severe that it could make people’s eyes congeal and encase their mouth and nose in ice. His crime had been to fall in with a group of free-thinking writers, some of whom were unwise enough to criticise the tsar, others of whom were even plotting revolution. He spent almost a decade in exile before returning to St Petersburg determined to stage his literary comeback.

Dostoevsky first read about Lacenaire in late 1860 while hunting for material for Vremya, the aforementioned journal. The 32-page account of Lacenaire’s trial he stumbled upon came accompanied by evocative engravings: the murderer well dressed in his top hat, cravat and high collar; someone about to swing an axe; the incongruous detail that Lacenaire had received a good education and wrote poetry. The author of the account speculated that Lacenaire had succumbed to the “ferocious materialism” and “egoism” of the day (referring to the radically amoral doctrine of German writer Max Stirner, whose ideas also inspired Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the hero of the Russian radicals). In his editorial note on the Russian translation he commissioned, Dostoevsky wrote that accounts of criminal trials like this are “more exciting than all possible novels because they light up the dark sides of the human soul that art does not like to approach”. In focusing on Crime and Punishment, The Sinner and the Saint necessarily misses revealing insights from elsewhere in Dostoevsky’s copious work. For instance, one of the purest expressions of egoism is Prince Valkovsky of The Insulted and Injured (“All is for me, and the whole world is created for me … And the more virtuous an act is, the more egoism there is in it. Love yourself – that’s the only rule that I recognise”.) Equally, because the narrative concludes with Dostoevsky’s marriage to his second wife, Anna, we miss the final 13 years. The couple will be exiled by debt and gambling in Europe, have four children and lose two of them, and Dostoevsky will develop his themes further in his three other acknowledged masterpieces, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. But that is outside the scope of Birmingham’s study, and it would be hard to fault the book on its own terms.

Meticulously piecing together the debates that fired Dostoevsky’s imagination, The Sinner and the Saint is filled with arresting details that bring the turbulence of the 1860s to life, such as the government officials, fearful of the youth, who “forced nihilist women to sign pledges that they would grow their hair long and wear crinolines”, or the radical writer, Pisarev, who enjoyed the enforced contemplation of solitary confinement so much he turned up to interrogations looking “as though he had somehow just arrived from a ball”.

Birmingham traces the evolution of Crime and Punishment through Dostoevsky’s notebooks, offering a thrilling glimpse of the creative faculties at work as he tweaks dialogue, defers the resolution of Raskolnikov’s motivations, and adds in unexpected twists. As we approach the end of The Sinner and the Saint, and Raskolnikov begins to live and breathe in all his complexity, Lacenaire begins to seem less and less interesting by comparison, a strangely two-dimensional narcissist who revels in the knowledge that his public was “captivated by my latest capers” and wants to wear his blue frock coat to the guillotine.

But it would be a mistake to read the title as referring to Lacenaire the Sinner, and Dostoevsky the Saint. Rather, each of us has the capacity for goodness and for cruelty. It is this fundamental insight by which Dostoevsky elevates the story of Lacenaire the unrepentant murderer into Raskolnikov the divided heart, who “might murder not because he was so evil but because he … wants to do good”, and whose actions turn out to be a mystery even to himself. Published 200 years after Dostoevsky was born, The Sinner and the Saint is not just a fitting tribute to one of the great works of world literature, but a dazzling literary detective story in its own right.

This review of The Sinner and the Saint by Kevin Birmingham was originally published in the Guardian. As you can tell, I loved it. For my own book on Dostoevsky, look here.

Mary Gaitskill: a reckoning

The world is beginning to catch up with Mary Gaitskill. In the UK, there has been renewed interest following Serpent’s Tail’s 2019 publication of her 15,000 word New Yorker story, ‘This is Pleasure’, as a slim standalone volume last year,[1] followed in 2020 by the publication of her Granta essay ‘Lost Cat’ in an equally slim volume of 90 generously leaded pages.

The raft of single-sitting books published in recent years gives one answer to how publishers can react to a cultural pace set online, when full-length works take years to gestate. It is also an opportunity to engage readers who might be intimidated by longer books, and who might not read literary magazines. The question is always whether these works benefit from standing alone and speaking to an audience beyond the rarefied literary scenes sustained by capital cities. Undoubtedly both This is Pleasure and Lost Cat do, not because Gaitskill has been writing her way towards popular culture but because popular culture has finally begun to reckon with her themes.

Born in Kentucky in 1954, Gaitskill ran away from home in her teens after her parents discovered she had smoked marijuana and tried to have her committed to a psychiatric institution. In Detroit, at sixteen, she was given acid by her roommate’s older friend and raped, a traumatic experience the significance of which, she later wrote, took her years to understand. At eighteen, she made for San Francisco, where she sold flowers to make ends meet, and then at twenty-one moved to New York to write, paying her bills by working at a strip bar. Her first collection of stories, Bad Behaviour, published in 1988 (and re-issued in 2018 as a Penguin Modern Classic), explored drugs, sex and power games. The best known story, ‘Secretary’, is a melancholy confusion of adolescent shame and desire – later adapted into a kinky, winky film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal (which Gaitskill called ‘the Pretty Woman version’). Popular attempts at imitation haven’t quite lived up to the original. Those who rolled their eyes at Fifty Shades of Grey’s moody and ‘troubled’ Christian Grey might recognise the traces of a rather more sharply drawn E. Edward Grey in Secretary. And it is perhaps Gaitskill’s influence we have to thank for the questionable sadomasochism subplot in Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

‘Lost Cat’ was published in the US as part of the 2017 essay collection, Somebody with a Little Hammer, which also includes her astonishing 1994 Harper’s essay about rape, ‘On Not Being a Victim’, which explores the ambiguity and complexity of consent, and is withering about stories that ‘are supposed to function as instruction manuals’. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, society at large has begun to reckon with consent through powerful non-fiction like Know My Name by Chanel Miller, as well as stories like ‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian and novels like My Absolute Darling, My Dark Vanessa or Trust Exercise. But this has been Gaitskill’s territory for some time, and her writing on the subject remains peerless.

This is Pleasure is narrated alternately by M. (Margot Berland) and Q. (Quin M. Saunders) – there is a hint at the Mary in both, though neither clearly represents the author’s views. The two middle aged friends have known each other for years and the story of their friendship is related in the years ‘before’ – before, we are given to understand, Quin was fired for being sexually inappropriate. Margot knows what he is capable of – on their third meeting, at a bar, he tried to reach between her legs. She told him to stop, forcefully, and he did. It is an early signal that the reader won’t be permitted the moral comfort of an irredeemable monster, and indeed Quin’s duality is striking. He is shown to be genuinely funny, and genuinely caring, and part of his acknowledged charisma relies on conspiratorial boundary-pushing – that challenging of taboo that many, in the sixties and seventies, saw as an untrammelled virtue. He offers one colleague a light spanking for being late to lunch; on meeting a stranger at a party, he asks her to bite his thumb.

Quin seems to feel that accusations of lasting emotional distress have been blown out of proportion, that his outrageous, camp performance of sexuality relied on mutuality – he would push boundaries as a way of ‘asking, inviting: Can you play, do you play?’. This is Pleasure is unusual for its lack of eagerness to arrive at judgment and, in doing so, lay a difficult subject to rest. And yet: why are the subjects of his interest always women? Why does their relationship rely on his positioning himself as the arbiter of their self-esteem? If it’s all a game, why is he the only one who can decide whether they play? Margot doesn’t believe Quin’s life should be ruined and sees that his actions were maybe ‘offensive’ rather than ‘hurtful’, but she is also angry at him, and has a right to be angry.

Gaitskill’s prose is sometimes described as cold or clinical, but those tonal descriptors give a false impression that the subject isn’t deeply felt. It would be better to say that preciseness is her way of caring, and part of what is beguiling about Gaitskill’s writing is the way she matches this direct style to piercing emotional acuity.

It is difficult to talk about feelings, perhaps harder than ideas, because so often our language is inadequate to the task of expressing what life really feels like: we are caught between clichés of physiology (hearts beating fast, stomachs flipping) and the blandness of abstraction (grieving, pining). But Gaitskill has a talent for the unexpectedly perfect adjective, and metaphors that feel more like a flourish than a last resort. A lesser writer could conclude that panic feels like falling through a trapdoor, but Gaitskill has her subject falling ‘into scalding chaos, clutching at supports that came off in my hands, plunging, and transforming, as I did, into a mindless thing, a receptacle of fear and pain’.

Aside from her style, part of what feels radical about both books is the tacit permission they offer to feel or not to feel – to be honest about your own affect, when others are insisting that other reactions are more appropriate. Writers are habitually praised as ‘honest’ in the way that toast is buttered, but emotional honesty that upsets norms, rather than enforcing them, is costly and risky.

A case in point: is it unseemly to compare the loss of a cat to the loss of a parent? There is something dangerous, destabilizing, about asking the question. The essay Lost Cat takes in the offered subject, an adopted stray cat called Gattino, and Gaitskill’s increasingly outlandish attempts to search for it as the days and months tick by. This leads, by emotional association, to contemplating the loss of her father and of a quasi-maternal relationship she developed with two inner-city kids, Caesar and Natalia, through a charity.

Across the essay, we feel the necessity of the seemingly irrational. (‘“Mio Gattino,” [sic] I whispered, in a language I don’t speak to a creature who didn’t understand words.’) This irrationality is at the heart of love. ‘Human love is grossly flawed, and even when it isn’t, people routinely misunderstand it, reject it, use it or manipulate it. It is hard to protect a person you love from pain, because people often choose pain; I am a person who often chooses pain.’

Here again, we are asked to make peace with duality. Caesar is no angel, but ‘cruelty can sometimes be so closely wound in with sensitivity and gentleness that it is hard to know which is what’. At times he is half-coherent in the way that all children are, at others ‘suddenly very mature’. And Gaitskill knows that speaking to her lost cat in her mind won’t change anything, but she can’t help doing it anyway. Feelings create their own reality, especially when the ‘known, visible order of things’ becomes unacceptable.

Lost Cat is a wise, heartbreaking book, so filled with love and pain that it is hard to understand how so much of the mystery of life can be condensed into such a short space. Gaitskill leaves you wondering at how often our crude attempts at communicating our need for love misfire, or meet with rejection (or offence). Everything depends on our accepting that human relations are too complex to submit to simple codes; that instead, we can only try to be careful and responsible with one another’s tender hearts; that love is not simply the solution to pain, and loss does not eradicate what came before.

This article was originally published in the Brixton Review of Books.

[1] Statement of interest: Serpent’s Tail published my two novels.

The Year Without Atmosphere


It has been a year without micro-expressions. Those little momentary flickers across someone’s face that tell you everything, absolutely everything. So, mediated by a screen, you blunder on, or you nod heavily, willing your eyebrows and the creases around your eyes to do more work. You stoop to chat through your twelve-inch window like a prisoner, a grid of blank, pixel-smoothed faces unreacting, their forearms Sphynxlike on desks just out of shot.

It is two months into your new job when someone mentions, in passing, that your microphone fails to capture the first few words of every sentence you utter, so no one has heard almost anything you’ve said. Until that moment, you believed that you were uninsightful and off-topic and you actually cried, getting off one call, at the feeling that you were a kind of business ghost, haunting meetings without ever provoking a response. You felt that your disappearance might actually be a relief to your colleagues. And then, when you realised what was happening, you overcompensated, ploughing into conversations like you were trying to rugby tackle the previous speaker, going in head first, hard and loud and fast and fluid.

You have had a lot of conversations, but it has been a year without background noise. No café murmurs or pub chatter, no train announcements: no belongings to keep with you, no buskers, nothing suspicious. No gaps to mind. No shared adverts, only the private, solipsistic ones that follow you from the desk to the sofa to the bed, offering something you don’t need but thought about buying four weeks ago because it reminded you of the vividness of the new. By now, the only square metre of the flat you aren’t sick of is the shower. It has been a year with one sky, hanging over the park you tread for fifteen minutes a day – at 12.30pm when the local Shiba is being walked, and the sausage-cross – in a figure of eight to make the path feel longer.

It’s nice to see the dogs playing, but they are the same dogs every day and you know, by now, that you won’t bump into others. The year has no felicity. No oil in the gears. You push harder to keep it turning, hoping that nothing will snap until the atmosphere returns. But you didn’t realise how much you relied on that felicity, how much you took for granted all those friends of friends. Of course you miss the book and album recommendations – you told your partner that the only album of the year you liked was Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell and she gently reminded you that it came out in 2019. You like hearing what someone else found important, those little tertiary obsessions that offer a little friction to your brain, a reminder that it’s part of a big world. You had never thought of it this way before, but you need people who have never heard your story because they give you a chance to tell it for the first time. It allows you to make tweaks, to try new versions of yourself out for size.

Without this felicity, you are reduced to riffing on the familiar: you want a new jumper like the one you own, but more comfortable. You have finally tried precisely one new recipe from the cookbook you bought two years ago and sometimes leaf through, disconsolately imagining living near a shop that sells asafoetida, and have given up on the idea of giving your money to a real shopkeeper and just ordered the asafoetida from Amazon.  You only then discover asafoetida is also known as hing, so perhaps it was there on the shelves all along. You wince at the weakness of the punchline: it wasn’t asafoetida you were missing, but deggi mirch. And it feels somehow typical that an Amazon order is the most interesting thing that happened that day, a revelation so minor it can barely be massaged into an anecdote. Instead, when you see a handful of friends for a Zoom catch up, you compare notes on which dregs of Netflix contain enough moisture to live off for another 23 minutes.

The summer offered a respite, though it was missing so many of the things that usually make up a summer. You went to a restaurant that had a large aquarium without any fish in it. Summer was like that: blue and still, lacking bodies. You lay in the park on your own, looking up at the sky. For your birthday, you found your carefully numbered friends a beer garden table where you ordered drinks using a shonky proprietary app. When a drunk guy on the next table along told your friend he looked like Jared Leto, and then found out it was your birthday and hugged you, the contact was shocking. You hadn’t hugged your mother in months; you hadn’t held your baby niece yet.

But who do you tell? There’s no one outside this, outside the year, who doesn’t know what it’s like. You and your partner take it in turns to listen to the other’s exasperated outbursts. You just want to go to a house party! You want to be in a club and feel a stranger’s sweat slip against your back, you want to do shots and feel music in your ribcage like your lungs are speakers, and squash onto benches and go to festivals and grab people by the face and kiss their forehead. You drink about the same as you ever did, but no longer in bouts, your intake smeared across the week. You know that by all rights the world’s aircraft should be grounded, but you want to go on holiday anyway and feel a stronger sun, trick your tongue with new flavours, glide through water like a fish in a goddamn aquarium, smell perfume again, because no one wears perfume any more, because no one shares an atmosphere this year; it’s the year without sharing: food and drink, touch, place, space. You are starting to forget what it’s like when a whole cinema laughs together. You forget the swelling roar of a stadium, the harmony of choirs.

Paradoxically, it has been a year without solitude, for you. The two of you are not more than three metres away from each other for more than half an hour a week. There is only the bed, the desk, the sofa. You alternate between them depending on which part of your body is aching, or who has a meeting that requires a neutral background. You put up a menu in the kitchen to remind you of the meals you both like and you alternate between those. You take it in turns to alternate between monologuing at each other about the minor entertainments you have cultivated to keep up the pretence of a distinction between your lives. (She has given up on Animal Crossing and is now devoted to BTS, whereas you have become an Arch-mage in Skyrim.) In the months that you are permitted by law, you go and sit in a café, take your face mask off and just sit, watching the convection on the surface of your coffee as it cools.

Has it been a year? It sometimes feels like it could have been many years, that you are one of a decimated population sitting in one of fifteen empty chairs in Caffè Nero. They don’t quite feel real, those days when you had to queue for ten minutes to buy the coffee, and when you could barely get a seat, let alone one of the coveted armchairs. Now you are splayed out across a sofa; you leave your laptop on the coffee table when you go to the loo because there’s no one there to steal it.

Most of all, you feel ungrateful. This year, there has been a great transfer of wealth from service, retail and entertainment workers to office people like you, who are normally lucky enough to spend half your monthly pay having fun. This is what being lucky looks like: being locked down for a few weeks while it’s raining, browsing for flannel pyjamas on your smartphone. All this yearning for life and yet behind it, you know that many people are not just indoors but gone, really gone. You weren’t thrown to the ground this year. The year didn’t eat your lungs and heart. In news briefings, you are encouraged to think in the fatalistic terms of other seasonal respiratory illnesses, but the comparison only makes the death toll harder to comprehend. You imagine a bomb being dropped on Exeter and survivors in other cities quietly venturing out to Tesco the next day to check if Pizza Express pizzas are on offer this week.

The fact is that, by coincidence, nothing fell on you. You feel acutely that you are reacting sullenly to a life that is perfectly pleasant. You can even see your friends for a winter walk, and do, and it’s nice to catch up. And you sit at a pub bench and have a mushroom risotto because it’s not on your home menu and it feels like an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up. And when, eight days before Christmas, your friend texts you to tell you that they have tested positive, and that they and you will have to isolate for Christmas, you are glad that they aren’t suffering too much. Neither are you. Sitting on your bed, you feel fine. Things could be a lot worse.

The long 2020 ended on 31st January 2021, a year after the first coronavirus case came to the UK. What do you do at the end of a year that is so hard to celebrate? Perhaps it would be better simply to forget. In Japan, there is a long held celebration called ‘the forgetting of the year’ (bōnenkai). Now, it is mostly for getting drunk, but it originated in sixteenth century feudal Japan as a time for writing, contemplation, and then feasting. As the anniversary of the arrival of the virus approaches, you know without searching that you can forget this year. It has not taught you anything. You know you aren’t perfect and it’s too much to expect that you will become so; you know you have a good life and sometimes take it for granted. Given so much time to decide what you want, you have decided that you want things to go back to normal.

You want to work in an office, go out for dinner, spot something in a shop window, catch up when you get home. You want to have something to catch up about. The tabloids dangle foreign holidays as an emblem of the dream life that awaits us all, but what you actually fantasise about is the symphony of little variations on your old weekly routine. Walking to a desk in the British Library, padding on the thick carpet through the momentous silence of hundreds of people deep in thought. You want to meet your friend outside a café and hug them, and buy them a coffee and bring it to them while they rush for the last available seat. You want to go on the hunt for a nightcap after the pub closes, striding down Old Compton Street and squeezing, elbow first, into a gap at the bar in Café Bohème, passing back drinks to two people you know and one you don’t. You want to take your niece to the park on the weekend, put her on your shoulders and support her little hands in yours. That would be perfect; it will be perfect.

First published by the London Magazine.