Chapters 1-11 Summary and Analysis

The story begins with the early biography of the primary male character Shura, who is born in 1925. Shura is a somewhat fictionalized version of the male author, Alexander Shulgin.

At the beginning of chapter one, the male narrator Theodore Stevens Bordorin (known by his loved ones as Shura) describes growing up in Berkeley, California in the late 1920s and 1930s. Shura's father is a Russian immigrant, while his mother is from a small town in Illinois. Both are schoolteachers. As a child, Shura does not spend much time with children his own age. Shura plays marbles with the them for a while, but eventually builds his own marble run, so he can play alone. Shura becomes fascinated with basements, probably because he prefers isolation. Shura is extremely precocious and wins a scholarship to Harvard at the age of sixteen...