THE SHADOW OF THE WIND

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Year: 2004 (2001)
Publisher: Phoenix
Language: English (translator Lucia Graves)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel “The Shadow of the Wind” is by any definition a wonderous and pleasant read. The writer takes the reader gently by the hand and carefully leads them into the world of intrigue, wonder, love, and friendship. But more than a novel, it is an elegant instrument in the disciplinary order of memory, literature, and identity. It is not simply a narrative about forgotten books and troubled writers, but a study of the circulation of power through language, bodies, and historical discourse. “The archive” as Michel Foucault would put it. Beneath its seductive aesthetics lies a matrix of panopticon and confession, wherein the subject is formed not through autonomy but through the interiorisation of surveillance and the repetition of fate as the narrative form.

The story is set in Barcelona shortly after the war as Francisco Franco’s falangist regime is still reeling from the post-war isolation and responding, as dictators do, with tightened control and brutal oppression. The protagonist Daniel Sempere follows his father to a place in Barcelona which even to the Barcelonians is mostly unknown: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Daniel is encouraged to pick out a book and become its guardian. He picks “The Shadow of the Wind” by Julian Carax, a name of whom he had thitherto been completely oblivious. Or rather, it picks him. Daniel’s relationship with the book, and his relentless search for its elusive author, will come to define his fate.  

At the centre of Zafón’s novel is the relationship triangle between Daniel Sempere, Julian Carax, and Inspector Fumero within a closed system of power. The narrative traces Daniel’s gradual descent into the life of Carax, but it is not simply the tale of a reader discovering a writer. It is the slow process by which Daniel is made intelligible as a subject through pursuit, confession, and surveillance under the persistent gaze of Fumero, the novel’s repressive figure of formal authority and informal malice.

Carax’ role in the novel less that of a living being as that of a dossier to be reconstructed through fragments, testimonies, and deduction. His life is retrieved through the operations of the archive, and his identity is constituted through gossip, rumours, letters, and third-party accounts

I could not help but read this novel through the lens of Michel Foucault’s power analysis, particularly as outlined in his groundbreaking book “Discipline and Punish”. Foucault names the shift from act to document as a crucial feature of disciplinary power, and Carax is the prototype: not a man, but a readable subject whose every gesture is translated into signs of deviance or resistance. For a relentless oppressor, every liberal act will look like insubordination. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Daniel, in seeking to uncover Carax, gradually assumes his narrative coordinates, becoming an object of observation himself. First for the reader. Then for Inspector Fumero.

The sadistic Inspector Fumero functions as the visible face of disciplinary violence. He is not merely a villain, but the embodiment of sovereign and bureaucratic power entwined—a fusion of spectacle and surveillance. Like the Foucaultian executioner-turned-warden, Fumero is a relic of an older, bloodier regime of control who nevertheless adapts seamlessly to the more modern modes of tracking and silencing dissidence. His obsession with Carax and, by extension, with Daniel, is not driven by personal vendetta alone, but by the imperative to restore narrative closure, to erase anomaly, to close the gap between deviance and punishment.

In this respect, Fumero finds a soulmate in Victor Hugo’s Javert from “Les Misérables” (see review from September 2022), who puts all original thinking and feelings aside in favour of becoming a dispassionate tool in the service of the system. Unlike Javert however, who submitted completely to the system and equated his personal value with it, Fumero makes the system a tool for his own personal campaign of vengeance and hatred.

In this triangular structure, Daniel becomes the hinge on which the door between the past grievance that pits Julian Carax and Inspector Fumero against each other, and the final showdown in the post-war present swings. Through his pursuit of Carax, he does not merely learn a hidden history; he is inserted into a chain of substitution. His desire to know becomes indistinguishable from the mechanisms of control that produced Carax’s erasure. That Fumero begins to pursue Daniel with the same fervour once reserved for Carax is no accident. Penelope Aldaya and Beatriz Aguilar, the love interests of Julian Carax and Daniel Sempere respectively, embody the parallelism between the two men, separated by generations yet united by discursive and biographical repetition.

This is why the novel’s long expository chapters, usually delivered through rather verbose confessions, feel less like storytelling and more like processing. The characters recount their pasts not as memory but as evidence. Structured, ordered, and precise. These passages resemble info-dumps more than literary flow, and to me manifest the transition from personal fate to archive. Zafón's narrative, as Foucault predicts, for all its emotional resonance, cannot escape the form of the report or the disciplinary file.

“The Shadow of the Wind” can, or maybe even must, be read in light of these mechanisms.

VOLOMARI VOLOTINEN'S FIRST WIFE AND ASSORTED OTHER OLD ITEMS

Author: Arto Paasilinna
Year: 2013 (1994)
Publisher: Brombergs förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Camilla Frostell)

A 2018 report by British researcher and educator Stephen Follows reveals that around 52% of all movies produced in the US and Europe so far in the 21^st century were categorised as drama, with comedy ringing in at 28% in second place, well ahead of other genres such as thrillers (12%), romance and action (11% each), and horror (10%).*

In literature a similar pattern emerges. Drama, thrillers and crime, and romance dominate the lists of bestsellers. Yet comedy is nowhere to be found.**

Why are there so few funny novels?

One possible explanation is that, unlike suspense and romance, which are largely propelled by plot, comedy, much like erotica, depends more heavily on the mode of narration. In this genre, the ‘how’ often matters more than the ‘what’. The effect lies not in events themselves but in their delivery. As a result, some might argue that such writing places fewer demands on events, relying instead on tone, timing, and voice to achieve its impact, making it infinitely more demanding to write.

Arto Paasilinna is frequently cited as a master of comic fiction and his books are hugely popular all over the Nordics and beyond. The title of one of his novels, “Volotinens första fru och annat gammalt” (“Volomari Volotinen's First Wife and Assorted Other Old Items”), is perfectly hilarious. While, as will become evident, accurately capturing the contents of the book, it nods playfully to an old, albeit arguably misogynistic, adage about women and ageing. I was understandably brimming with anticipation when I began reading, eagerly expecting to snort-laugh my way through it. After all, I have laughed out loud more than once at other books by other authors, though few and far between.

Set during the height of the Cold War, the story follows Volomari Volotinen, a Finnish insurance investigator, and eccentric collector of historical oddities. His pursuits, ostensibly harmless, soon entangle him in a series of situations, some of which will even have political ramifications for Finland’s delicately balanced relationship with the USSR. His wife Laura, twenty years his senior, ever so loyal and at times unexpectedly resourceful, sometimes needs to step in and assist when Volomari goes overboard in his enthusiasm.

Though presented as a novel, the book reads more like a series of loosely connected short stories, unified by recurring protagonists rather than a continuous narrative arc. Each chapter typically centres on a single object of interest, Volomari’s latest fixation, serving as both its title and narrative anchor. The episodes are largely self-contained, with storylines that begin and conclude within the bounds of each chapter.

Unfortunately, I was forced to conclude that the book falls short for precisely the reasons outlined earlier. While Paasilinna scrambles to construct humorous scenarios for his protagonist, he lacks the esprit and comic precision necessary to render them genuinely amusing. The episodes themselves, while potentially entertaining as anecdotes shared over a family dinner, are held back by a delivery that feels mundane and uninspired. The result is a collection of stories that rarely transcend their artificiality, leaving the reader more aware of the author’s hand than immersed in the humour.

What begins as an endearing portrayal of Volomari gradually gives way to something more unsettling. As the narrative progresses, his enthusiasm for collecting turns into obsession, and his antics shift from amusing to awkward. Far from the goofy but likeable nerd, Volomari emerges as a calculating and opportunistic manipulator, willing to exploit both his professional position and the trust of others to acquire objects that would otherwise remain out of his reach. His transformation bears an eerie similarity to that of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey.

On the whole, the reading experience proved underwhelming. The situations in which Volomari finds himself lack the absurdity required to elicit genuine farce, while the narration falls short of the wit and precision needed to provoke sustained amusement. The spontaneous, laugh-out-loud moments brilliantly delivered by comic masters like Jaroslav Hašek, Sir Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and to a certain extent Mikael Niemi, Tom Sharpe, P.G. Wodehouse, and Jerome K. Jerome, in “Volotinens första fru och annat gammalt” are, regrettably, entirely absent.

 

* Some movies have more than one label, which is why the percentages do not amount to 100.

** Instead, fantasy and sci-fi make up almost 25% of books published but seem to be far down the movie genre list.

THE SHACK

Author: William P. Young
Year: 2009 (2007)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Nowa Proza
Language: Polish (translator Anna Reszka)

William P. Young’s novel “Chata” (“The Shack”) has left a remarkable impression on countless readers around the world, offering a story of pain, hope, and reconciliation with God that resonates with the spiritual struggles of many Christians. Blending narrative fiction with theological reflection, Young’s book strives to explore the deepest wounds of the human heart while grappling with the mystery of divine love. Although its popularity is understandable, “Chata” raises serious questions about its theological vision, especially its portrayal of the Holy Trinity and its approach to the existence of evil. While it provides moments of comfort and emotional healing, its treatment of these profound mysteries may leave some readers with a distorted or overly sentimental view of Christian belief.

The story follows Mack, a husband and father whose family life is torn apart by a horrifying tragedy. Years later, still gripped by grief and bitterness, Mack receives a mysterious invitation to return to the scene of his deepest pain; a secluded shack in the Oregon wilderness. There, he encounters three mysterious figures who claim to be the three Persons of God, drawing Mack into a transformative, personal conversation about suffering, forgiveness, and the very nature of God. The novel unfolds as a journey of spiritual healing, in which Mack confronts his questions about God’s justice, the problem of evil, and his own ability to forgive.

Young’s central literary approach is to render the idea of the Trinity in vivid and surprising human form. God the Father is represented as an African American woman, the Holy Spirit as an ethereal Asian woman, and Jesus as a Middle Eastern carpenter in modern attire. This imaginative device is clearly meant to jolt the reader out of conventional images of God while at the same time making divine love more accessible to an everyday person like Mack. There is a legitimate pastoral aim here: to remind readers that God is not an old white man with a beard, and that divine compassion transcends cultural stereotypes.

However, this narrative strategy risks more confusion than clarity. Christian tradition, both in Catholicism and in many other denominations, carefully maintains that the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct, co-equal, consubstantial, and beyond human categories, even as they fully reveal themselves in Jesus Christ. The Father, strictly speaking, is not incarnate and does not take on a human form other than through the Son who became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Depicting the Father as a human woman, however well-intentioned, can mislead readers into thinking of God the Father as having a distinct incarnate identity apart from the Son, blurring fundamental Christian doctrines, and devaluing the great wonder and mystery of God taking on human form and walking among us as in the Person of Jesus Christ. Similarly, personifying the Holy Spirit as a visible, embodied woman may imply a separate incarnation, which goes beyond anything in Scripture or orthodox tradition. While these literary choices are meant to be symbolic, their impact can easily sow confusion about one of the deepest and most carefully articulated doctrines in Christian faith*.

In addition to its Trinitarian problems, the novel’s treatment of theodicy also deserves careful scrutiny. Mack’s personal suffering is horrific and deeply relatable: how can an all-powerful, all-loving God permit such overwhelming tragedy? In a pastoral sense, Young does well to allow Mack to voice anger and pain, refusing to trivialise the brutal reality of loss. That aspect of the book has truly resonated with people who have sought comfort in God in their own tragedies but felt abandoned.

Yet the book’s answers to the problem of evil remain, in the end, rather flat. Young’s God seems to explain away suffering in terms of human freedom and the necessity of love, but without acknowledging the truly terrifying weight of certain evils or the long history of theological wrestling over innocent suffering. The characters offer reassurances about divine love that are emotionally comforting, but they fall short of addressing the mystery of why a good God needs to permit suffering in the first place. The Church has developed a rigorous and sometimes painfully intricate theodicy that respects the tragedy of evil while clinging to hope. Much of that complexity is ignored in this book in favour of a warm, reassuring, cuddly message which, while consoling, may leave deeper questions frustratingly unexamined.

In fairness, “Chata” does succeed in reaching people who might never crack open a catechism or a theology text, which I suppose is the main purpose of the book. Its narrative has drawn many wounded souls into asking questions about God they might otherwise avoid. For that reason, from a churchly perspective it should not be dismissed entirely; there is genuine pastoral power in its language of intimacy, mercy, and healing. In particular, the novel’s consistent message of humility, unconditional love, inclusion, and boundless forgiveness stands as a great virtue. Many modern Christians, who often harbour bigotry, prejudice, and hard-heartedness in their faith lives, could learn a great deal by contemplating this element of Young’s story. The book’s passionate insistence on God’s universal love is a welcome antidote to the cold legalism, moralism, and tribalism that can creep into contemporary Christian practice.

Even so, those strengths cannot erase the book’s real theological shortcomings. Its confusion about the Trinity, its oversimplified theodicy, and its romanticised spirituality all call for a prudent, critical reading, preferably supplemented with sound theological guidance. For all its emotional resonance, “Chata” remains, in the end, an oversimplified, romanticised, and somewhat naïve vision of God’s engagement with human tragedy. Readers who embrace its consolations should do so with discernment and an awareness of the rich, complex intellectual heritage that Christian tradition continues to offer beyond the walls of Young’s fictional shack.

*Although admittedly, this is no worse than the all-too-common depiction of God as an old white man with a beard.

DOCUMENTED MIRACLES

Author: Micael Grenholm
Year: 2018
Publisher: Sjöbergs förlag
Language: Swedish

When I was but a tender sapling of a lad, my parents bought two books for me which I read over and over again. One told of phantoms and haunted castles, the other of marvellous beasts and monsters. Though a dim candle of reason flickered within my youthful mind and deep down I knew that the stories were not true, I willingly surrendered to the tingling sensation of marvel and awe. Each chapter, each sighting, each ostensibly irrefutable testimony filled me with joy. I chose to believe so that each time I opened the books I could once more relive the sensation of wonder and amazement.

My sentiments were rather similar when I recently laid hands on Micael Grenholm’s “Dokumenterade mirakler” (not available in English but the title means “Documented Miracles”). I expected nothing more than a charming parade of more or less loosely connected coincidences, imaginative interpretations, far-fetched explanations, misunderstandings, and fabrications, all passed off as indisputable evidence of God’s existence. I was looking forward to an entertaining albeit inconsequential read.

Yet, once I began to peruse the pages, I discovered that the author’s aspirations were of a different order. The author sets forth to not only list miracles as he perceives them, but moreover to prove that they are a thing of the world of senses, and not stopping there, to establish a link to a specified miracle-worker.

Grenholm pays significant attention to defining the boundaries of his field, circumscribing the term ‘miracle’, and introducing concepts such as the Swedish acronyms VOTEB and VOTUB (Scientifically Inexplicable Health Recoveries After Prayer and Without Prayer respectively). With these terms planted into the reader’s mind, he proceeds to parading a succession of anecdotal yet curiously persuasive evidence in which the terminally ill rise from their beds, seemingly without any plausible medical explanation. Grenholm goes through remarkable pains to validate his material and cite his sources, and he manages to demonstrate that full restoration of health contrary to medical expectations indeed occurs and is perhaps less rare than one might think. Thus far, there is no controversy. Neither ancient nor modern medicine ever proclaimed itself infallible. Sometimes patients that are expected to get worse and even die, recover. Other times, patients who were expected to make a full recovery, perish. Medicine, like all sciences, is imperfect. That is why we continue to do research.

Grenholm’s enterprise becomes decidedly more obscure when he departs from the terra firma of facts and ventures forth into the mist-shrouded realm of philosophy. His chapters, to be sure, are nothing if not thorough, even admirably so, yet several of his arguments, upon closer scrutiny, warrant considerable doubt.

As but one example, Grenholm takes up arms against David Hume’s assertion that the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary must be the evidence that sustains it. Grenholm seems to disagree. To illustrate his criticism, he recounts the story of a famous actor who enrols at a high school to immerse himself into the role of a high school-student. When he tries to tell a classmate that he is indeed a Hollywood celebrity, she refuses to believe him. Nothing the actor says, can persuade her. Grenholm argues, that if the student had later wandered into a cinema and seen on the silver screen the very same actor play the part he claimed he would, it should suffice as proof of his claim. And as simple a thing as a movie, he says, can hardly be dignified with the title of “extraordinary evidence”.

In this argument, Grenholm unfortunately makes the mistake of conflating his aggregation levels. Despite having earlier exercised a scrupulous precision in defining his terms, here he treats the word “extraordinary” with a carelessness quite unworthy of his former diligence. “Extraordinary” in the philosophical sense, denotes that which lies outside the boundaries of a given system. In his example, all participants inhabit a world whose fundamental premise they share. They all agree on the existence of actors, movies, high school, and cinemas. They all operate within the same system. Thus, the actor’s confession, while unusual, cannot be called extraordinary in any rigorous sense and consequently requires no extraordinary evidence. Both claim and evidence are of the system.

If we would narrow the system down to the high school only, and create a closed universe of students, classmates, and liars, then both actor and cinema would be outside the system and thus considered an extraordinary piece of evidence in favour of an extraordinary claim.

Translated to miracles, we are transported to a system governed by the laws of nature and the claim of divine intervention is nothing less than a declaration of the supranatural trespassing on the natural I am sure Grenholm would agree with this proposition. If miracles are indeed extraordinary and unnatural, it stands to reason that the evidence to support their existence need also be extraordinary.  

My reasoning above certainly does not disprove the existence of miracles. I maintain that Grenholm’s case for the existence of miracles is strong. But statistically and scientifically unlikely as they are, there is little evidence that they are external to our system, and the connection between miracles and the Christian God still remains to be demonstrated.

In a way, it is quite impossible to leaf through the pages of “Dokumenterade mirakler” without one’s thoughts irresistibly straying to Dr Bonamy from Emile Zola’s novel “Lourdes” (see review from July 2019). Here we encounter the good doctor, a man of education so confident in his image of the incorruptible scientist, perched loftily upon a pedestal of unimpeachable rationality, meticulously chronicling the supposed miracles unfolding before him, all in the noble name of knowledge. And yet, on closer examination we see how deeply involved he is in the belief system, functioning, with a naïveté bordering on the tragic, as an unwitting instrument for the advancement of superstition.

In my personal view, proving the divine armed with the frail minds and limited equipment of humans, calibrated merely to navigate the dull harmonies of the natural world, is a task fit for fools. The Mount Everest of apologetic history is littered with the remains of those who have tried and succumbed before Micael Grenholm. Anshelm of Canterbury, Averroës, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Kurt Gödel… all had their go, and failed.

And so, it appears to me that using human faculties to understand God is like stacking bricks to build a tower to heaven. In truth, I suspect these grand endeavours reveal far less about the nature of God than they do about the fathomless depths of our own conceit.

 

PÈRE GORIOT

Author: Honoré de Balzac
Year: 1976 (1835)
Publisher: Czytelnik
Language: Polish (translator Tadeusz Zelenski-Boy)

Honoré de Balzac’s “Ojciec Goriot” (“Père Goriot”) is a haunting study of human motives in a society driven by ambition, status, and material gain. Beneath its realist detail lies a profound meditation on the tension between altruism and egoism, a tension that plays out through its central characters and constitutes an important literary contribution to the philosophical scrutiny of the theme by many thinkers before and after. Balzac's Paris is not merely a backdrop but a moral melting pot where love, sacrifice, and ambition merge.

Goriot himself represents an extreme form of altruism: a man who gives his wealth, his dignity, and ultimately his life for the happiness of his two daughters. He expects nothing in return, finding joy in their comfort, even as they abandon and exploit him.

The figure of Eugène de Rastignac provides the moral counterpoint to Goriot’s doomed idealism. A young provincial law student, Rastignac arrives in Paris dazzled by the glamour of the aristocracy and hungry for success, yet not initially corrupted. He is seduced by wealth, elegance, and power, but he does not abandon his principles lightly.

SPOILER ALERT

His relationship with Father Goriot acts as a moral anchor; in the old man’s quiet suffering, Rastignac perceives a kind of nobility absent from the salons and ballrooms he increasingly frequents. He cares for Goriot with genuine compassion, tending to him in his final decline, moved by a mixture of pity, affection, and admiration. For as long as Goriot lives, Rastignac resists the full embrace of ambition. He stands, if uneasily, in the moral space between selflessness and self-advancement.

But with Goriot’s death, that space collapses. The man who represented disinterested love and unwavering devotion is buried without ceremony, abandoned by his daughters, unmourned by the world he gave everything to. At his grave, something in Rastignac shifts. The city’s glittering façade no longer conceals its cruelty. It reveals it. What was once temptation now becomes strategy; what was once aspiration becomes a challenge. It is only after Goriot dies, and with him the last human bond that had tied Rastignac to an ethic of care, that the young man’s heart hardens. His infamous declaration “À nous deux maintenant!”is not simply a cry of ambition; it is a renunciation of sentiment, the moment he steps fully into the logic of Hobbesian egoism. The social world, as Hobbes imagined, is a battleground, and Rastignac, no longer restrained by affection or idealism, enters it with icy resolve.

This moral transformation is as disturbing as it is understandable. In the world Balzac depicts, those who cling to ideals are destroyed, while those who embrace calculation and self-interest survive, perhaps even flourish. And yet this flourishing is not without its own pathology. For Friedrich Nietzsche, values like altruism and self-sacrifice are symptoms of weakness, tools of the powerless to bind the strong. Yet the strength Rastignac gains is ambivalent. He wins power, but loses warmth. He becomes shrewd, but perhaps no longer fully human. Balzac neither condemns nor celebrates this metamorphosis; he simply records it, with cold precision.

The moral world of “Ojciec Goriot” becomes truly troubling when viewed through Nietzsche’s critique of altruism. For Nietzsche, values like self-sacrifice and humility are the product of a “slave morality”. Goriot’s relentless self-denial, his total subjugation to the will of his daughters, would appear to Nietzsche not as virtue but as a form of decadence; a renunciation of the will to power and of life itself. His daughters, who manipulate and discard him in pursuit of beauty, status, and influence, are closer to Nietzsche’s “strong” individuals, though without his corresponding ideal of the creative, life-affirming Übermensch. They are not admirable, but they are potent, and in their cold self-interest, they expose the fragility of Goriot’s love. Balzac neither endorses Nietzschean strength nor Goriot’s abjection; instead, he holds them both up to scrutiny, showing the horror of a world where moral weakness is punished and moral strength is dehumanizing.

What emerges from this interplay of philosophical ideas is not a simple moral lesson, but a tragic recognition of the contradictions at the heart of human life. Altruism, in its purest form, may be beautiful, but it is also profoundly vulnerable to exploitation. Egoism, on the other hand, offers power and success, but at the cost of empathy, connection, and moral clarity. Balzac seems to suggest that the moral ideals we inherit, whether from Kantian duty, Hobbesian realism, or Nietzschean egoism, cannot be cleanly applied to the mess of social life. Each contains truth, but none is sufficient. The novel ends not with resolution but with irony: Rastignac ascends, Goriot is buried alone, and the city looms indifferent and vast, its glittering promises secured only by the loss of innocence or the collapse of self.

In this way, “Ojciec Goriot” becomes not only a work of literary realism, but a philosophical drama or a parable of modernity in which love and power, virtue and strategy, collide with tragic inevitability. Balzac does not moralize; he exposes. His characters are not lessons but questions, and the answers they suggest are as disturbing as they are true.

 

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Year: 2021 (1864)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish (translator Cecilia Borelius-Rohnström)

Some people choose to be unhappy. Not because they are doomed by fate or overwhelmed by circumstance, but because they cannot bear the vulnerability that joy and connection require. For these people, happiness feels like weakness, and love like exposure. The only emotion they feel safe expressing is resentment and their most reliable source of comfort is to distribute that unhappiness outward, like a contagion.

In “Anteckningar från ett källarhål” (“Notes from the Underground”), Fyodor Dostoevsky gives voice to one such man. The Underground Man, bitter, and obsessively self-conscious, lives in voluntary isolation, sharpening his cynicism and building elaborate justifications for his own misery. He is a man who has turned away from the world not because the world has rejected him, but because connection demands surrender, and surrender is unbearable.

He is not simply a man without love. He is a man who cannot tolerate being loved.

While the novel is often read as a philosophical precursor to existentialism, indeed Jean-Paul Sartre cited it as an influence, what makes Dostoevsky’s short but dense work so powerful is its psychological clarity. The Underground Man is not merely a symbol or a theoretical construct; he is a living case study in emotional dysfunction. His life is defined by a profound inability, and ultimately an outright refusal, to love or be loved.

This is not because love is unavailable to him, but because love requires vulnerability, surrender, and an openness to grace, all things he equates with humiliation. What emerges from “Anteckningar från ett källarhål” is a portrait of a deeply damaged personality: a man whose need for control and pride is so consuming that it obliterates his capacity for intimacy. The ultimate incel, if you wish.

“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness,”* the Underground Man proclaims early in the novel. This diagnosis of himself is remarkably prescient. The character’s hyperconsciousness, his habit of analysing every motive, overthinking every emotion, and anticipating every possible humiliation, aligns closely with what Søren Kierkegaard would call "the sickness unto death": the despair that comes from being alienated from oneself. In Kierkegaard’s view, despair is not simply suffering, but a state of active self-estrangement, in which the self refuses to be what it truly is. For the Underground Man, selfhood is not a project to be realised, it is a battlefield on which he endlessly defeats himself.

In modern psychological terms, we might recognise this as a narcissistic defence mechanism in which vulnerability is so intolerable that it must be replaced by control. His encounters with others are not opportunities for connection but arenas for psychological warfare. His interactions with former schoolmates are marked by bitterness and a fixation on perceived slights.

Most tragic, however, is his encounter with Liza, a young prostitute who offers him the possibility of tenderness. When she responds to his philosophical speech on degradation with something like empathy, he becomes unhinged. What could have been a moment of shared humanity, becomes an existential threat. Liza threatens to see him, to treat him not as a freak or a failure but as a person. He cannot allow it. He responds by humiliating her, handing her money in a moment that reads like a deliberate reenactment of her life-trauma.

“But this I can say for certain: though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the heart, but came from my evil brain.”*

What makes this so poignant is that he knows exactly what he is doing. This tension between insight and paralysis lies at the heart of Dostoevsky’s genius. The Underground Man is not delusional. He is painfully self-aware. But rather than using that awareness to change, he uses it as a weapon against both himself and others. His failure to act, to connect, to seek forgiveness is filtered through a philosophical defence of inaction. People with deeply entrenched cognitive distortions will often reject positive experiences because they contradict the internal narratives they have built. Such experiences threaten to shatter the very cornerstone of their identity as outcasts and victims. The Underground Man cannot accept Liza’s compassion because it violates the only truth he believes defines him: that he is fundamentally unlovable.

What makes Dostoevsky’s portrayal so unsettling is that this refusal of love is not presented as a personal flaw to be overcome. It is presented as a choice. The Underground Man chooses his isolation and nurses his misery. He would rather suffer on his own terms than risk happiness on someone else’s. This is not the story of a man who could not find love. It is the story of a man who saw love coming and slammed the door shut. In doing so, he ensured that he would never be humiliated. But also, that he would never be saved.

* English quotes are from the Judith Boss translation at Project Gutenberg.

WINTER IS COMING

Author: Garry Kasparov
Year: 2015
Publisher: Public Affairs
Language: English

In 2010, in the aftermath of the global credit crunch triggered by the American sub-prime crisis and the sudden failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers Inc, the Greek economy had come under particular pressure. Standing at the brink of national bankruptcy that would risk hurling the entire world into a second calamity, the EU launched an aid programme leading to a conservative disbursement of merely 52 billion euros. At that time, I was following the events in Greece in my professional capacity and my verdict was “Not nearly enough. This will hurt more than help.”

In 2014, the makeshift barricades of tyres and sandbags on the Independence Square in central Kyiv were still aflame when the Russian government annexed Crimea and covertly moved troops into Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine responded with whatever military force they were able to muster whereas the Free World chose to impose modest and largely inconsequential sanctions on selected individuals and companies. Again, as a professional observer of the unfolding conflict where people were losing their lives and their freedom, my verdict was “What would happen, if Barack Obama, at the invitation of Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, would deploy 50,000 troops to Donbas? I bet not a single shot would be fired, and no one would have to die.”

In the case of Greece, the aid package was interpreted by the market as the ultimate limit of the EU’s willingness to stand by Greece, and speculation against Greek national debt exploded. In the end, the EU had to bail Greece out with a total of 330 billion worth of support programmes.

In the case of Ukraine, faced with such lukewarm and hesitant resistance, Vladimir Putin was emboldened to eight years later launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine leading to the death of close to a million Russian soldiers to this date, and heaven knows how many Ukrainian troops and civilians.

My point is that skimpiness today, may multiply the costs by tomorrow.  

In that light, Garry Kasparov’s “Winter Is Coming”, first published in 2015, i.e. just about the time I was bemoaning the vacuum of decisiveness in the face of danger, reads as a vindication.

Kasparov, the chess grandmaster-turned-oppositionist, has spent the better part of two decades shouting into the wind. The book is an unflinching indictment of Western complacency, tracing a direct line from the Second Chechen War (see review of “A Small Corner of Hell” from September 2023) and the suppression of independent media to Crimea, Donbas, and beyond. His language is unsparing, his targets broad: Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, George W. Bush—each is rebuked for misreading or enabling the Kremlin. Kasparov is particularly dismissive of the recurring Western delusion that Putin is a pragmatic leader who merely seeks respect and security.

What distinguishes Kasparov’s analysis is less the originality of the insight than the moral urgency with which it is delivered. While many commentators held out hope that Putin’s authoritarianism might be tempered by economic integration or generational change, Kasparov saw a different pattern, one disturbingly familiar to those who study autocracies: consolidation, repression, expansion. His instincts have proved more accurate than many of the softly hedged assessments emanating from think tanks and chancelleries.

This provokes a haunting suspicion. If Kasparov understood … if even I understood … How could Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Herman van Rompuy not understand? The only conceivable answer is that they did. They simply failed to act.

One thing that Garry Kasparov, in all his unquestionable lucidity, did not foresee is the ongoing demolition of liberal freedoms and democratic institutions in the Free World. He did not predict that the US would turn on its allies and join the ranks of autocratic and oppressive regimes and he did not predict that Europe, instead of exporting its liberal values to Hungary, Serbia, Belarus, and Poland, would instead import their penchant for racism, populism, and nationalism.   

Kasparov writes not as an academic or a diplomat, but as a participant in Russia’s political unraveling. His reflections on the missed opportunities of the Yeltsin years, the rise of the siloviki, and the Kremlin’s mastery of manufactured consent offer more than polemic. There is real analysis here, shaped by direct confrontation with the machinery of the Russian state. That lived experience, alongside his fluency in the West’s ideological blind spots, gives the book a unique and, in hindsight, tortured and furious voice.

What once seemed like Cassandra-like fury now reads, unsettlingly, as reportage from the near future. With Ukraine engulfed in war, and Western democracies scrambling to reset their posture toward Moscow, Kasparov’s book has acquired the gravity of foresight fulfilled. Few will finish “Winter Is Coming” without conceding that the grandmaster saw several moves ahead. The time is come to pay the full price of what could have been managed at a bargain ten years ago. It is far from certain, that the West will prove solvent.