Literature
Maternity Leave

The Brothers Karamazov
By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Locke gives Gale a book by Dostoyevsky.

Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest of Russian writers, whose works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction. Often featuring characters living in poor conditions with disparate and extreme states of mind, his works exhibit both an uncanny grasp of human psychology as well as penetrating analyses of the political, social and spiritual states of Russia in his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic precursors to modern-day thought and preoccupations. He is sometimes considered to be a founder of existentialism, most frequently for Notes from Underground, which has been described by Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written".

In 1848 Dostoyevsky joined a group of young intellectuals, led by Mikhail Petrashevsky, which met to discuss literary and political issues. In the reactionary political climate of mid-nineteenth-century Russia, such groups were illegal, and in 1849 the members of the so-called Petrashevsky Circle were arrested and charged with subversion. Dostoyevsky and several of his associates were imprisoned and sentenced to death. As they were facing the firing squad, an imperial messenger arrived with the announcement that the Czar had commuted the death sentences to hard labor in Siberia. This scene was to haunt the novelist the rest of his life. Dostoyevsky described his life as a prisoner in Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1862; The House of the Dead), a novel demonstrating both an insight into the criminal mind and an understanding of the Russian lower classes. While in prison the writer underwent a profound spiritual and philosophical transformation. His intense study of the New Testament, the only book the prisoners were allowed to read, contributed to his rejection of his earlier liberal political views and led him to the conviction that redemption is possible only through suffering and faith, a belief which informed his later work.

Dostoyevski's last work was Bratya Karamazovy (1880; The Brothers Karamazov), a family tragedy of epic proportions, which is viewed as one of the great novels of world literature.

The novel recounts the murder of a father by one of his four sons. Initially, his son Dmitri is arrested for the crime, but as the story unfolds it is revealed that the illegitimate son Smerdyakov has killed the old man at what he believes to be the instigation of his half-brother Ivan. Ivan's philosophical essay, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, is a work now famous in its own right.

Presented as a debate in which the Inquisitor condemns Christ for promoting the belief that mankind has the freedom of choice between good and evil, the piece explores the conflict between intellect and faith, and between the forces of evil and the redemptive power of Christianity.

Dostoyevsky envisioned this novel as the first of a series of works depicting The Life of a Great Sinner, but early in 1881, a few months after completing The Brothers Karamazov, the writer died at his home in St. Petersburg.

Lancelot
By Walker Percy

In Maternity Leave, Sawyer is seen reading once again (our little bookworm) and this time it's Lancelot by Walker Percy.

PLOT SUMMARY

Lancelot is the first-person narrative of Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a lawyer confined in a psychiatric prison, the so-called Center for Aberrant Behavior. There he is visited on five occasions by a man named Percival, a psychiatrist-priest who was Lamar’s boyhood chum and who has remained his lifelong friend. Percival has taken the priestly name of Father John, and he listens silently as Lance unburdens himself. In bits and pieces, Lamar gradually reveals his life story, recalling the important things that he has both done and left undone, whether for good or ill. The attentive Father John speaks not a word during Lance’s long rambling monologue, until the very end, when he utters two syllables: Yes twelve times and No once. Such a narrative would seem incapable of holding the reader’s interest, but it isin fact one of Percy’s most gripping works.

The novel begins on All Souls Day, November 1, the Day of the Dead. From the start, Percy suggests that Lancelot Lamar is a dead soul, and that he does not belong among the blessed dead. The novel’s epigraph is taken from Dante’s Purgatorio, a passage wherein Beatrice Portinari—the ideal love of Dante’s life—explains that she descended from heaven to hell, there summoning the Latin poet Virgil to lead Dante through all the regions of the damned as the only possible way to rescue Dante from his wretched condition. Lance has intimations that he too has been living in hell. Yet he is convinced that he is about to venture on a new path to a paradisal existence. In fact, Lamar divides his adult life into two periods. He is exceedingly angry about having lost the best years of his life to what Percy calls “everydayness”—to the empty and thoughtless routines that occupy most middle-class souls. But now Lance believes that he has entered into a revolutionary new phase, having found a radical kind of moral and spiritual excellence that will characterize the remainder of his days. Lamar confesses that he became strangely alive upon discovering that his daughter Siobhan is illegitimate and that her real father is her mother’s lover, a moviemaker named Merlin. This startling discovery sets Lamar on what he calls his “quest,” his determination to discover the nature of evil, to prove that sin really exists. If it does not, he argues, then neither does God exist. As the novel makes increasingly evident, Lancelot Lamar is not a conventional hero; he is an anti-hero. He is not a splendid but a sordid soul, a man who seeks redemption by plumbing the depths of evil. He is not a noble knight in search of the Holy Grail but an ignoble cuckold seeking unholy proof of God’s existence. He is, in sum, one of Walker Percy’s most complicated characters.

The novel ends with Lance’s recollection of the burning of Belle Isle, his country estate. It is an apocalyptic fire of final judgment set by Lancelot himself, as he incinerates his decadent wife Margot, her new lover Jacoby, and two other people. Percy’s plot makes no a conventional Aristotelian movement from beginning through middle on to end. The novel's progression deals, instead, with Lamar’s increasingly violent denunciations of our age and with his equally violent remedy against its evils. As in none of his other novels, Walker Percy requires a decision of his audience: we must make our own judgment of Lance’s brilliant rant. His confession to Father John rivets our interest because it forces us to ask whether Lamar is making a moral advance or a moral regression, whether he possesses revolutionary religious insight into the horrors of our age, or whether he has committed new and worse horrors of his own. As Lamar says to his friend Percival, so does Percy declare to his readers: “You must decide … for yourself”

See Ralph Wood review

Stephen King

Henry asks Locke if there is any Stephen King or Hemingway books in the hatch. Locke replies no, and gives him the Brothers Karamazov instead.

It also of note that the writers have a penchant for Stephen King, especially The Stand, which has been cited as being used for character reference.  (See Other Books for more information)

Hemingway

As cited above Henry asked about Hemingway books in the Swan Hatch.  Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Nicknamed "Papa", he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris known as "the Lost Generation", as described in his memoir A Moveable Feast. He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime. For a serious writer, he achieved a rare cult-like popularity during his lifetime. Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic males who must show "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered canonical in American literature.