>supposed to be depressing
>the dinner and the parts with Apollon are comedy gold
Explain this

>>24558904 (OP)
This is what Kafka thought also. When Kafka wrote the Metamorphosis he couldn't stop laughing.

>>24558904 (OP)
Yes, that part was funny.

>>24558904 (OP)
>>24559404
both are the funniest and the most depressing books ever written at the same time
that's why they are good

Loved the bit about how women see it’s fine to playfully torture someone they love. Stalking that guy and going out of his way to buy a fancy collar so he could run into him made me giggle. Dinner scene was hard to get through.

>>24558904 (OP)
being a self-hating, piece of shit loser is hilarious

>>24558904 (OP)
>Loved the bit about how women see it’s fine to playfully torture someone they love.
What? Are you somehow merging this book with White Nights?

>>24559939
this... kek.

>>24558904 (OP)
Are there any modern equivalents of this but MC is an internet troll?

>>24559404
Chapter 1 of Metamorphosis is funny. Chapter 2 and 3 are the serious ones.

>>24560249
Yeah. It's called the board catalog

Its funny, maybe its the translation I read or whatever, but I didn't pick up on the comedy cues as readily when I first read Notes from the Underground at around 18; in a way I did, but the comedy didn't really bite like, say Vonnegut's writing for me at that time. I kind of feel the same way about Metamorphosis by Kafka: the set up was amusing, but not like laugh out loud funny for the most part. The fight scene In Metamorphosis was undeniably funny though. Translating comedy and satire must be so hard man; writing it seems hard enough. I rented out "Dead Souls" by Gogol; the translation done for the Everyman 's Library Collection by Random House and it's goddamn hilarious bro: I didn't finish it, because other people wanted to rent the same book out, but I loved every second of reading that book:)

>>24558904 (OP)
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.