With Dostoevsky in the Bathtub

“I wandered late at night through this lunar landscape, where bodily desire has completely replaced all feeling… (I) fucked with the delight of a child accidentally locked in a candy store, and wrote it all down.” Often to the music of Bob Marley.” — Dany Laferrière

“Strange how the shyest women are drawn to monsters.”

Laferrière observes this in the Montreal subway, watching a “delicately built Chinese woman” reading Hemingway, “the old brute.” The author peppers the narrative with insinuations. Sometimes admirers follow him after barely a few minutes of first encounters, without any prior conversation. It even happens “that I take a girl home without even asking her name.” Yet Laferrière spends the most thrilling—and above all happiest—times with Dostoevsky in the bathtub, traversing the “frozen Russia (and other) more mysterious regions.”

Women swarm the debutant. In one especially touching scene, a neighbor—who usually presents herself almost naked—perches on the bathtub rim in a dress. She hasn’t just invited herself; she also seems like a hostess. She fusses over Laferrière with “oysters, lemon, salt, two bottles of wine and …” Resigned, the bathtub reader closes his eyes. Once again, it will not go without sex.

“Weddings are drunkenness and sanctity, sweat under the dress, buttercream in the mouth.”

In the autumn season, the best reasons circulated for why marriage was an outdated model, and by the next spring, everyone at least engaged—those who until now never wanted to commit. Wedding fever rages like an epidemic among friend groups. In Weddings, Leslie Jameson dissects the phenomenon of hysterical alliance formation in typically New England scenes, beginning with a ceremony in an antique “whaler’s church in the afternoon, salted and sunlit, in the tipsy glow of an old barn.” Moby Dick nods knowingly.

Of all the scenarios Jameson presents, my favorite is this: “To get off on a dusty road in the Catskills* in front of the post office and wait for someone to take you to the lodge. There is always a lodge. There are always cocktails in the lodge.”

“The mountain range was named after the settlement of Catskill, located at the mouth of the creek of the same name flowing into the Hudson, founded in the north of the former Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland.” — Wikipedia

The Catskill Mountains are one of the physiographic provinces of the Appalachians; Woodstock is located there. Some trace the name to mountain lions, mentioned in 17th-century Dutch pioneer records. Variant spellings like Kaatskill and Kaaterskill still exist, allowing speculation about a phonetic lapse. Catskill could have derived from a corrupted Dutch mourning marker. Perhaps a crime took place locally, and so the area came to be called: Where Kate was killed — Waar Kate werd vermoord / Where Kate was killed.

Even in the Catskills, there is “a program for the guests… (and) a bridesmaid frantically searching for her shoes.”