"A Posthumous Confession" by Marcellus Emants

I found this novel via Coetzee (in fact he's the translator of the version I bought) and, though a bit slow-going and very reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, it is keeping my interest.

    My wife is dead and buried.
    I am alone at home, alone with the two maids.
    So I am free again. Yet what good is it to me, this freedom?
I am within reach of what I have wanted for the last twenty years
(I am thirty-five), but I have not the courage to grasp it, and would
anyhow no longer enjoy it very much.

*

I've also got plans to dig into T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" again this summer. The "Notes" have always intrigued me, because I'm not sure they go very far toward elucidation.  Maybe I just need to read Weston's book, as T.S. suggests, but I'll probably save that for another time. Instead, I've printed out various essays and perspectives from the Net. I'll start here.

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