Early in his career Dostoevsky wrote “The Double,” featuring a man who literally splits into two, and he was by far not the first European writer to air out the theme of the bifurcated psyche. I don’t seek treatment, and never have, although I respect medicine and doctors.”Īlthough he is not up in your face as forcefully as is Dostoevsky’s narrator, the Captain is in a similar limbo, living the life of in-between-neither fish nor fowl. But then, I don’t know jack squat about my illness, and probably don’t even know what hurts where.
We are not surprised later to learn that the narrator-never named, known only as the Captain-loves Russian novels, for this first paragraph recalls the beginning of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” featuring one of the most perverse split-personality ironist narrators in the history of world literature: “I’m a sick man. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.” I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.
“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Just read the first page already you know you are in the presence of a talented writer. Don’t bother reading all the blurbs that go with the paperback edition of this book (The Sympathizer, Grove Press, 382 pages).
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