When I read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground at school, it was like fireworks going off in my head’ … Claire Messud. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
Books
that
made me
Claire Messud: ‘Reading Dostoevsky made fireworks go off in my head’
The novelist on how Notes from Underground lit her path to the dark side, the brilliance of Penelope Fitzgerald and comforts of Anna Karenina
Friday 15 February 2018
The book I am currently reading
I’m just starting All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, about the last months of the second world war in East Prussia. Kempowski is also the author of Das Echolot, the extraordinary multi-volume compendium of interviews, testimonials and documentation about the second world war that surely served as an inspiration for Svetlana Alexievich’s writings about Russia – only one volume of which has been translated so far.
