Delirifacient

The novel was inspired by an offhand remark of Luis Buñuel's. He apparently disliked the linear narrative in Dostoevskii's 'Crime and punishment' and thought the book would have been much improved if, 'as Raskolnikov ascends the stairs to murder the old pawnbroker, a boy on his way to buy a loaf of bread rushed past him and suddenly became the focus of the narrative instead of Raskolnikov'. Thence a novel of a young man bumping into Raskolnikov and rushing off and never seeing or hearing anything even remotely connected to the events and world of 'Crime and punishment'

1880s Russia, a young man deficient in both active personality and practical efficacy. A world infatuated with cruelty and nihilism, indifference enshrined as religion. Temporality and geographically enforceable space as rigorously drained as most remnants of morality and idealistic aesthetics. Surrealism without the lofty, generous estimations of human possibility