Reviews tagging 'Rape'

Memorie del sottosuolo by Fyodor Dostoevsky

7 reviews

saomah5566's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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olavboi1003's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

A really peculiar book. The first forty pages are terrible, and near gibberish. I understand that the existentialist subject matter of the first part was new literary ground at the time Dostoevsky wrote it, but nowadays you would be better of reading Camus' The Outsider or Sartre's Nausea. The second part, though, is a lot better. A lot more propulsive and insightful than the rambling start of the book, and quite dramatically dense. The relationships between the characters tells me as a reader more about existensialism than any number of pages from the opening chapter. 

So, quite poorly paced, and I think it is a lot to ask of your readership to sit through forty pages of drivel before you get to the meat of the story, but interesting nonetheless, and undeniably well written towards the end. 
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night3aven's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

  • Notes from the Underground - review

Dostoevskij is certainly a master when he has to express the deep psychological conflicts and hidden ideas of his characters, but this doesn't mean that he is always also a good writer.
And Notes from the Underground is the perfect example of this.

In fact, I agree with most of the ideas Nabokov expressed in his short review of this literary work at the end of the book.
Notes from the Underground is truly a "concentrate of Dostoevskij", that perfectly captures his philosophical and political ideas, his opinions, his literary tendencies and hints to many leitmotifs that will be used in future books (
e. g., both the theme of the freedom of choice and the woman as a character that "purifies" the anti-hero/main character, recurring elements in Crime and Punishment
).
However, it's easy to say that the book's merits end there: the content is there, but it is too dense and the style doesn't really have any peculiarity or interesting trait, other than being somewhat chaotic and, again, very dense (in typical Dostoevskian style).
The main character is simply horrible (for no particular logical reason), most of his choices don't really make sense and the plot is basically nonexistent (
and let's not even talk about the ending, which is completely terrible and nonsensical; it would be hard to justify any of the things that happened even for Dostoevskij's number one supporter
).
Furthermore, the book doesn't even pass the test of time: it might have made sense for a Russian citizen who had read it as soon as it was published, but the modern reader can hardly relate to the societal struggles and difficulties shown in the book, which are strongly related to everything that was happening in Russia at the time Dostoevskij wrote and published this literary work.

In the end, even the best writers can fail and, let's not kid ourselves, if anything resembling failure ever flowed from Dostoevskij's pen, this is definitely it: as beautiful or entertaining as one may find it, it is really just a complete mess.

The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation...
...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.
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abbyschafer's review against another edition

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tense slow-paced
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No

2.0

Dostoevsky really captures the self-righteous, manic ramblings of someone who has locked himself in a basement for 40 years (derogatory) 
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marjoleinvanderspoel's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Loved the first part, but the second part was major incel vibes. All the things Raskolnikov didn't do wrong, the underground man did (and vice versa tbf since at least he didn't kill anyone). Still, dostoyevsky is great as always.
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nicole_koenigsknecht's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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a_ira's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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