Coming Soon: The Readers Karamazov Season 3
/
Friends (and, why not, foes too): I am very pleased to announce the relatively imminent (April) arrival of The Readers Karamazov Season 3: The Name of the Rose.
In Season 1 we tackled the big book from which we take our name, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And we put a great season of other books around it, from Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head to Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossed to Shūsaku Endō’s Silence. It was a season full of great discussions and lots of experimentation, as we figured out how to run a podcast, make it sound reasonably good, and cram it all in to our busy lives.
Like a good sitcom, we took a season to get our legs under us and figure out what we were about. Season 2, then, was a period of refinement. Our big change was working to make a cohesive season, rather than just a collection of parts. So, while we kept a diverse array of literature, we worked to hone our focus so that every book chosen fit around our big book, Middlemarch. Sometimes that connection was quite obvious, as with our discussion of Madame Bovary. At times the discussion was at the level of ideas, like Candide. And sometimes the connections were diffuse but alluring, as in our discussion of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain. Because of that laser focus, we pruned some things from Season 1, getting rid of premium film episodes to ease the editing burden on me a little.
What’s ahead for Season 3? At its core, this season will provide more of the same essence of The Readers Karamazov: lively discussions of great books (broadly defined) that consider both the formal elements of the words on the page, and the philosophical ideas underpinning them (or just flitting below the surface). For our big book this year, we’ve chosen an exciting one: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. This is a much more contemporary pick than our previous two 19th Century door stoppers, though the book’s 40 years old at the point, but it’s a classic of philosophically-inclined literature. Eco’s story, set in a medieval monastery, combines mystery, religion, the burgeoning of modern epistemology, and… theories of comedy? It’s a wild ride, equal parts entertaining and thought provoking. For myself, I’m looking forward to revisiting the book after a gap of 15+ years.
Around Eco’s cornerstone, we’ve laid a 3 part foundation to the season that plays off of three major components of The Name of the Rose. The first is fairly obvious: monks, the main characters in Eco’s book, take center stage in our books of Part Two. Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund (Friedrich’s first pick) offers a backwards glance at the Middle Ages that shares some DNA with Eco, but then things get weird. My first pick, Walter M. Miller Jr.’s classic sci fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, gives us a glimpse into a subgenre that Karl likes to call “cybermonk”: future monks doing monklike things. Then Karl gives us a completely other set of monks to consider, of the Buddhist variety, in his pick, Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
In Part 3 we move from characters to plot as we tackle Mysteries - but again in a diffuse manner. Friedrich starts us off right with a foundational work in the mystery genre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Then I pick the first book in a contemporary classic series, Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, which transports the detective novel into segregated, postwar Los Angeles. Finally, Karl brings us Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, in which the mystery is as much inward as it is outward. To cap off this rousing section, we’re bringing back a very special double feature film pod where we discuss Nicholas Ray’s film of In a Lonely Place (starring that most careworn of gumshoes, Humphrey Bogart) alongside Carl Franklin’s 90s neo-noir film of Devil in a Blue Dress (starring Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle, who steals every scene he’s in).
We bring things home in Part 4 with a section on Mirth. Like the lost Aristotle treatise on comedy that plays a big role in The Name of the Rose, these books will beguile you with their humor. Friedrich takes us back to Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a devastating satire of philosophical absurdities aimed largely at our disowned father, Hegel. Then I bring to the pod one of my all time favorite novels, Flann O’Brien’s mystery box (yeah, it could have gone in Part 3) The Third Policeman, one of the most blistering, mind bending dark comedies you’ll ever read. Karl wraps up the season with the perfect pick, John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which blends grotesque humor with medieval philosophy - a fitting end to a season that began with Eco’s book (and oh yeah: through sheer coincidence, it was published the same year as The Name of the Rose).
I hope you’ll come along for the ride, whether or not you read the books as we work our way through them. And, if you’re so inclined, throw a bone our way by telling a friend or two (or ten). Like Kevin Costner, we do this for the love of the game, but it’s always extra motivating when we know that people are listening and following along. Watch for the first episode, on the first two sections of The Name of the Rose, during the first week of April. Until then: happy reading.