¿It may seem paradoxical to speak of such insights as liberating, or to find in the Underground Man¿s impassioned rejection of rational humanitarianism a call to arms. Yet each age we live through as individuals demands a certain kind of book- just as each era thieves the last with a magpie¿s lust for the gewgaws of thought. Oddly enough, now I come to look at Notes again- and examine it in the round- I discover that my revised impression of it as a text at once jejune and cynical, callow as well as wise, is not, perhaps, too far from reality.¿ -Will Self ¿¿(Dostoevsky)... is the