One word of assent, one name provided, one signature appended, and it was done: in its simplicity was its glory.

But the road to get to that point of "simplicity" passes through a labyrinthine "haberdashery of hierarchy" called as the Conclave, which comprises about 120 Cardinals, who will elect their Pope, in what is the oldest of all elections within the annals of psephology, "surrounded by a rising flood of discord."

I have not watched the movie adaptation of this novel yet, despite having been a strong contender for the Oscars (under various categories) after a good run at the Golden-Globes as well. Despite the sensational climactic portions of the novel, Robert Harris does not come out as a provocateur. It is interesting to note that he did not have any plans to venture into this novel until well after he got to watch the two conclaves of the modern times in 2005 and 2013. That he took this very experience to pen a mysterious-thriller, behind what is supposedly a mystifying and stupefying electoral process steeped in mystery, secrecy, spiritual creed and human greed, is what may be behind the raving reviews behind its movie adaptation in 2024/2025.

Robert Harris had in one interview stated that he was inspired by CP Snow's The Masters to write this novel, after he got piqued by what he saw during the recent 2 conclaves. What is fascinating is that the author is neither a Catholic nor a follower of any organized faith, and yet was able to establish his gravitas on the subject-matter, with a meticulous punctilio encompassing the rubrics, the liturgical prayers, the regalia of the vestments, factionalism within the contemporary Catholic church, its leadership, on the usage of Latin versus vernacular, geopolitical tilt between the developing and developed nations, social upheaval etc.

It was a riveting, engaging, suspense-thriller. There is witty-humor (nerdy, I would add)��,

"To a layman, the euphemisms of terror were as universal and baffling as the Tridentine Mass."

thought-provoking mots��

"Out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks �� regardless of whether that heart's abundance be good or bad, wise or foolish."

philosophical references, as in Immanuel Kant's in this case��.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

or even an intense, deep, personal and spiritual thought as this:

"No one who follows their conscience ever does wrong, Your Eminence. The consequences may not turn out as we intend, it may prove in time we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong. The only guide to a person's actions can ever be their conscience, for it is in our conscience that we must clearly hear the voice of God."

"அறிவ�� நூல்களில�� நம�� மனதை ஒருமைப்படுத்துவத��, அறிவ�� நூல்களின�� விஷயங்களைக�� கற்பது, வெறும் நம்ம�� அறிவுலகத்தின�� மேதை என்ற�� அடையாளப்படுத்துவதற்க�� அல்ல...இன்னாத உலகத்த�� இனியதா�� ஆக்குவதற்க��....துன்பம�� நிறைந்�� சமூகத்தில் இன்பத்தை உருவாக்குவதற்க��... அந்த நிலைப்பாட்டை உருவாக்குவது தான் (திருவள்ளுவர்) 'கற்க' என்ற�� ஆணையிட்ட வழியில�� கற்றதன�� வழியில�� சிந்தித்து செயல்படுவத��."

Besides the milieu of the two companions corresponding, the third faceless protagonist is loneliness itself. So, how lonely was it? Devushkin says, "sometimes there'd be a fly in my room and you could hear it flying." In an entry elsewhere in her diary, Varavara notes, "one day followed another, and each day resembled the one before."

Enough said!

The reader is forced to fathom the nadir of poverty, the algia of possible loss of dignity, hope, and love, by merely being a helpless spectator to these to and fro letters between Devushkin and Varenka. While the letters themselves hold the cues to the material poverty, which was the Fate of the underclass, the ingenuity of Dostoevsky lies in the unspoken words that are imbued and immanent within those correspondences that make it readily apparent about the moral and spiritual impoverishment.

That final line in the previous para, is probably the largest takeaway for me from this novella.

Because, poverty is writ large, throughout the correspondences. While certainly not jeremiads, they do point towards the abject poverty with its obstinate presence on both sides of the protagonists. Yet, there seems to be a moral and spiritual strength that towers-up and transcends their quotidian Fate, which keeps them going. They are able to discuss Literature, exchange books, discuss Pushkin's, Nikolai Gogol's works, etc. just to name a few. They are able to strengthen each other with words of constant encouragement, friendly admonishment, and endearing solace, regardless of those moments when the ground under their feet is about to give up. At one point, Devushkin even says, reminiscing some bad memories:

"it's hard, but it's as if the memories were pleasant. Even what was bad, what I even got upset about at times, in my memories even that is somehow cleansed of the bad part and comes before my imagination in an attractive form."

No wonder, nostalgia seems to always be attractive. Elsewhere, in an entirely different context, Varavara's diary entry seems to agree with that characterization:

"Memories, whether joyful or bitter, are always a torment �� for me, at least �� but even that torment is a delight."

Yet, towards the very end of the novella, [spoilers removed]

Is this probably the poverty that Dostoevsky was attempting to posit to in Poor Folk? I mean, was he pointing to the ethereal, while commenting on the terrestrial?

I believe so.

Out of the few scenes, the ones that remain etched in my consciousness are the ones involving [spoilers removed] Pretty powerful scenes!

Reading this early work, when Dostoevsky was 23 years old, one can relate to all the plaudits that came in his direction as Nikolai Nekrosov finished reading the manuscript overnight exclaiming, "We have a new Gogol!" which was only affirmed by Vissarion Belinsky's "The novel reveals such profundities of characters and of life in Russia as no one had ever dreamt of before."

Putting down this novel, after 180 years of its writing, I observe a world very much devoid of letters, in its communications between each other. A world seized strongly by brain rot with its own set of careless memes, sub par emojis, and shibboleth sounding abbreviations and acronyms masquerading as the lingua franca for communicating soulfully!

Which only wants me to pick-up a bull-horn and holler Devushkin's words from one of his letters:

"Of course letters are a good thing; everything's less dull."

So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man.

My dear fellow, sensitive souls whose gifts are deployed in a lofty sphere are lacking in that spirit of intrigue which is so resourceful in contriving schemes. Their genius lies in chance; they don't see things, they come on them by chance.

I am ike many pious men, men who appear to be profoundly religious but are quite as atheistic as we are, you and I.

பம்பாய்க்க�� பத்தாவது மைலில்�� 1981ஆம�� ஆண்ட��
கல்கண்டு வா�� இதழில் வெளிவந்த தொடர்கதை. துப்பறியும�� விவேக்கின் ஆரம்�� கா�� நாவல�� என்றும�� சொல்லலாம��. மர்மமா�� முறையில் டில்லியில் இருந்த�� கிளம்பும�� விமானங்கள், பம்பாய்க்க�� 10ஆவது மைலில் வெடித்து சிதறுவதாகவும�� அத�� திறம்ப��(

Yes, (I am) a poet in life, because life is poetry. People are free to distort it, if they like!

Do you expect me to load myself every day with a fresh supply of world news and then to shout about it all week till it runs out? They argue, they discuss everything from every possible point of view, but they are bored, they are not really interested in the whole thing: you can see they are fast asleep in spite of their shouts! The whole thing does not concern them; it is as if they walked about in borrowed hats. They have nothing to do, so they squander their energies all over the place without trying to aim at anything in particular. The universality of their interests merely conceals emptiness and a complete absence of sympathy with everything. To choose the modest path of hard work and follow it, to dig a deep channel -- is dull and unostentatious, and knowing everything would be of no use there, and there would be no one to impress!

��Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.��

Neil Gaiman

��Words have a longevity I do not.��

��The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.��

��Any major illness transforms a patient’s—really, an entire family’s—life.��

��Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.��

��I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking.��

��Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.��

��And because, in the context of Paul’s diagnosis, I became aware of not just his mortality but my own.��

��Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.��

��(People often ask if it is a calling, and my answer is always yes. You can’t see it as a job, because if it’s a job, it’s one of the worst jobs there is.)��

��Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.��

��And so it was literature that brought me back to life during this time.��

��Samuel Beckett’s seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I’ll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’��

��I feared I was on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor, preoccupied with empty formalism, focused on the rote treatment of disease—and utterly missing the larger human significance.��

��Nabokov, for his awareness of how our suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another.��

��Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can.��

��it did make the throwaway assumption that the mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naïve understanding of the world.��

��Though we had free will, we were also biological organisms—the brain was an organ, subject to all the laws of physics, too!��

��Literature provided a rich account of human meaning; the brain, then, was the machinery that somehow enabled it. It seemed like magic.��

��What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.��

��Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.��

��I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.��

��I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

��There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced—of passion, of hunger, of love—bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats.��

��Why was I so authoritative in a surgeon’s coat but so meek in a patient’s gown?��

��Our patients�� lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins.��

��Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit.��

��Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.��

��In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action,�� and I felt like one.��

��With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.��

��When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.��

��Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic�� syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news.��

��The favorite quote of many an atheist, from the Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, belies this revelatory aspect: “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.��

��Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity—sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness—because I found them so compelling…The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.��

��About God I could say nothing definitive, of course, but the basic reality of human life stands compellingly against blind determinism.��

��Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.��

��Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.��

��Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state.��

��After reading the book you are about to read, I confess I felt inadequate: there was an honesty, a truth in the writing that took my breath away.��

��There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.��

"Many people might expect the talk to be about dying. But it had to be about living."

"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us."

"It saddens me that many kids today are so coddled."
"It saddens me that so many parents and educators have given up on this. When they talk of building self-esteem, they often resort to empty flattery rather than character-building honesty."

"When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a bad place to be. You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you, and want to make you better."

"When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you."

"engineering isn’t about perfect solutions; it’s about doing the best you can with limited resources.."

"Time must be explicitly managed, like money."

"The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something."

"Under the ruse of giving an academic lecture, I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children."

"That is what it is. We can’t change it. We just have to decide how we’ll respond. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."

"TOO MANY people go through life complaining about their problems. I’ve always believed that if you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you’d be surprised by how well things can work out."

"Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier."

While I re-read this book on a Kindle version, my vote is for the actual paperbound version I have, as the photographs from this book on Kindle are subpar.

The only thing is that I know how bad I am��

May the steppe come alive and blossom in all its glory. ~ Chingiz Aitmatov

His childlike sense of humor, is as usual, traded against individuals, classes, groups, institutions and even the Church. In the Mechical Justice, he satirizes the meritocratic Professor of the academe.

As I may have stated in my earlier review of Kuprin’s,what this sensitive soul of a writer does, is to see through the eyes of his very characters. Naturally, his flair and storge for animals �� especially dogs �� comes out fully in The White Poodle and Dog’s Happiness.

To pay a tribute to Kuprin on this short-story collection, will be to paraphrase his own, in a slightly different way: We can look at the characters and scenes of his stories in this short-story collection, with a microscope, while they in turn can look at us with a telescope, especially when we are approaching this short-story collection after a century since it was originally written.

Ivan had been born in the eternal darkness.

For him the water which filtered through the walls of the mine was a shower of tears, and that which trickled, yellow of tint, across the ore resembled flowing blood.

"Ah, how gladly one would see those one loves, were it only for a single moment!"

Which of these fops would care more if his country was in disarray than his hair? Who is not more worried about having his head look good rather than it be safe?