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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
I give a gold star to myself for finishing this book. And enjoying it! It was not an easy read. It's incredibly dense, which is one of the things I liked about it. Had trouble keeping the minor characters straight. There are a lot of them and the Russian name thing tripped me up a lot at first. I did take a break mid-book to read some other lighter stuff. But I came back and was richly rewarded. The best thing about this book are the characters. Nowhere in fiction have I encountered any like them. They are mercurial, unpredicatable and yet, believable and compelling. Also, even up to the last page the book doesn't go where you think it going to go. When characters who were created over 100 years ago reach out to you, take you places you don't think you're going to and leave indeliable impressions on you, that's amazing. I guess that's what they mean by classic.
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is a LONG meandering book. Don't expect plot, but in-depth character studies.
Prince Myshkin is kind, compassionate and devoid of lust like the asexual Jesus Christ. But he is also amoral like Albert Camus' Meursault.
Murderers and children feel safe in the presence of Myshkin. After Rogozhin murders his fiance he does not say "I forgive you, Rogozhin". In Myshkin's mind, there is nothing to forgive, Rogozhin has done nothing wrong. In his multitudinous compassion, the rules of right and wrong are lost.
Does kindness and understanding to ALL, breed amorality?
Hermanne Hesse states it best,
Prince Myshkin is kind, compassionate and devoid of lust like the asexual Jesus Christ. But he is also amoral like Albert Camus' Meursault.
Murderers and children feel safe in the presence of Myshkin. After Rogozhin
Does kindness and understanding to ALL, breed amorality?
Hermanne Hesse states it best,
"The highest reality in the eyes of human culture lies in this dividing up of the world into bright and dark, good and evil, permissible and forbidden. For Myshkin the highest reality, however, is the magical experience of the reversibility of all fixed rules...
The fact that this foe of order, this frightful destroyer, appears not as a criminal but as a shy, endearing person full of childlikeness and charm, a good-hearted, selfless, benevolent man, this is the secret of this terrifying book."
slow-paced
Dostoyevsky set out to portray a "positively beautiful man" in The Idiot. Unfortunately in our society, such a character can only end up one way.
[spoilers]
Quotes I wrote down that I found funny or noteworthy
‘’Beauty like that is power,’ Adelaida said hotly. ‘With beauty like that one may turn the world upside down!’
-
“…I’m not contradicting myself: a silly woman with a heart and no intelligence is just as unhappy as one with intelligence and no heart. That’s an old truth. I’m a silly woman with a heart and no intelligence, and you’re a silly woman with intelligence and no heart; we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.”
-
“…with the most complete politeness, with the most refined, so to speak, politeness, I approached whelp-dog with two fingers, I approached the lap-dog with two fingers, delicately picked it up by its collar and flung it out of the window after the cigar! You should have heard the squeals! The train continued to speed along…”
-
“…none the less, with despotic obstinacy she insisted on her impossible caprice.”
-
“I’m going to the streets, Katya, you heard, that is my place, and if not there, then I’ll be a washerwoman!”
-
“He felt intolerably ashamed, and his childish impressionability, which had not yet become accustomed to filth, was revolted beyond all bounds.”
-
“My home is.. sheer hell, an enigmatic sphinx has moved in, and I wander about and understand nothing.”
-
“I have soaked my pillow with tears at night — not about you, dear man, don’t worry, I have my own sorrow, another, eternal and always the same. ”
-
‘Exactly like me, exactly, my portrait in every way,’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna would say, ‘the self-willed, nasty little demon! A nihilist, an eccentric, a mad girl, wicked, wicked, wicked! Oh, Lord, how unhappy she’s going to be!’’
-
“But what distinguished Lizaveta Prokofyevna was that in the melée and muddle of the most ordinary things, because of the anxiety that was always in her, she always managed to discover something that frightened her to the point of making her ill with the most suspicious, most inexplicable fear, which was therefore very difficult to endure. ”
-
“Why has she been posing riddles for everyone for three days?” [Of Bjork]
-
“… I think that you ought not to have brought him here, if this is the same consumptive boy who burst into tears that time and invited us to his funeral.”
-
“But first of all let us examine the psychological and legal position of the accused. We see that the accursed, or, so to speak, my client, in spite of all the impossibility of finding any other edible object, several times in the course of his curious career revealed a desire to repent, and declined to consume ecclesiastics. We see this clearly from the facts: it is mentioned that he did indeed eat five or six infants, a relatively trifling figure, but none the less significant in another respect.“
-
“We have all stewed to mush, all, all of us!”
-
“If he’s alive, then everything should be within his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn’t understand that?”
-
“What matters is life, nothing but life — its revelation, constant and eternal, while the discovery matters not at all!”
-
“When, about eight months ago, I really became very ill, I broke off all my social contacts and abandoned all of the friends I’d had. As I have always been a rather gloomy person, my companions found it easy to forget me.”
-
“Is it possible for an image to contain that which has no image?”
-
“It’s impossible to remain in a life that takes such strange forms, which offend me. That apparition has humiliated me. I am not able to submit to a dark force that takes the shape of a tarantula. ”
-
“I bequeath my skeleton to the Medical Academy for the benefit of science.”
-
“Could I simply not be devoured without being required to praise what has devoured me?”
-
”I hardly exist any more, and I know it; God knows what lives in me instead of me.”
-
“Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for example, than to be wealthy, of decent family, of decent appearance, not badly educated, not stupid, even kind-hearted, and at the same time to possess no talent, no special quality, nor even any eccentricity, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly 'just like everyone else.'”
----
----review---
Devastating - the gradual obliteration of such a pure soul is heart-wrenching to watch.
Each character has something to offer on the book's overall theme of 'living one's life to the fullest.'
Highlights: Ippolit's 'Confession', the Epilogue, any scene with Nastasya Filippovna or Lizaveta Prokofyevna, The General's fantastical 'true stories', etc
-
Was super fun to read, Nastasya Filippovna is the perfect foil to Prince Myshkin. Dostoyevsky is the queen of rap.
9/10
(maybe 10. idk)
-
Soundtrack:
Blackstar, Have You In My Wilderness, The Milk-Eyed Mender, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, Igor, Flower Boy, Cherry Bomb, 50 Words for Snow, Deathconsciousness, Isn't Anything, Loveless, m b v, Long Season, E, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and Literally Every SIngle Radiohead B-Side Track (87 of them lmfao)
Quotes I wrote down that I found funny or noteworthy
‘’Beauty like that is power,’ Adelaida said hotly. ‘With beauty like that one may turn the world upside down!’
-
“…I’m not contradicting myself: a silly woman with a heart and no intelligence is just as unhappy as one with intelligence and no heart. That’s an old truth. I’m a silly woman with a heart and no intelligence, and you’re a silly woman with intelligence and no heart; we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.”
-
“…with the most complete politeness, with the most refined, so to speak, politeness, I approached whelp-dog with two fingers, I approached the lap-dog with two fingers, delicately picked it up by its collar and flung it out of the window after the cigar! You should have heard the squeals! The train continued to speed along…”
-
“…none the less, with despotic obstinacy she insisted on her impossible caprice.”
-
“I’m going to the streets, Katya, you heard, that is my place, and if not there, then I’ll be a washerwoman!”
-
“He felt intolerably ashamed, and his childish impressionability, which had not yet become accustomed to filth, was revolted beyond all bounds.”
-
“My home is.. sheer hell, an enigmatic sphinx has moved in, and I wander about and understand nothing.”
-
“I have soaked my pillow with tears at night — not about you, dear man, don’t worry, I have my own sorrow, another, eternal and always the same. ”
-
‘Exactly like me, exactly, my portrait in every way,’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna would say, ‘the self-willed, nasty little demon! A nihilist, an eccentric, a mad girl, wicked, wicked, wicked! Oh, Lord, how unhappy she’s going to be!’’
-
“But what distinguished Lizaveta Prokofyevna was that in the melée and muddle of the most ordinary things, because of the anxiety that was always in her, she always managed to discover something that frightened her to the point of making her ill with the most suspicious, most inexplicable fear, which was therefore very difficult to endure. ”
-
“Why has she been posing riddles for everyone for three days?” [Of Bjork]
-
“… I think that you ought not to have brought him here, if this is the same consumptive boy who burst into tears that time and invited us to his funeral.”
-
“But first of all let us examine the psychological and legal position of the accused. We see that the accursed, or, so to speak, my client, in spite of all the impossibility of finding any other edible object, several times in the course of his curious career revealed a desire to repent, and declined to consume ecclesiastics. We see this clearly from the facts: it is mentioned that he did indeed eat five or six infants, a relatively trifling figure, but none the less significant in another respect.“
-
“We have all stewed to mush, all, all of us!”
-
“If he’s alive, then everything should be within his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn’t understand that?”
-
“What matters is life, nothing but life — its revelation, constant and eternal, while the discovery matters not at all!”
-
“When, about eight months ago, I really became very ill, I broke off all my social contacts and abandoned all of the friends I’d had. As I have always been a rather gloomy person, my companions found it easy to forget me.”
-
“Is it possible for an image to contain that which has no image?”
-
“It’s impossible to remain in a life that takes such strange forms, which offend me. That apparition has humiliated me. I am not able to submit to a dark force that takes the shape of a tarantula. ”
-
“I bequeath my skeleton to the Medical Academy for the benefit of science.”
-
“Could I simply not be devoured without being required to praise what has devoured me?”
-
”I hardly exist any more, and I know it; God knows what lives in me instead of me.”
-
“Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for example, than to be wealthy, of decent family, of decent appearance, not badly educated, not stupid, even kind-hearted, and at the same time to possess no talent, no special quality, nor even any eccentricity, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly 'just like everyone else.'”
----
----review---
Devastating - the gradual obliteration of such a pure soul is heart-wrenching to watch.
Each character has something to offer on the book's overall theme of 'living one's life to the fullest.'
Highlights: Ippolit's 'Confession', the Epilogue, any scene with Nastasya Filippovna or Lizaveta Prokofyevna, The General's fantastical 'true stories', etc
-
Was super fun to read, Nastasya Filippovna is the perfect foil to Prince Myshkin. Dostoyevsky is the queen of rap.
9/10
(maybe 10. idk)
-
Soundtrack:
Blackstar, Have You In My Wilderness, The Milk-Eyed Mender, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, Igor, Flower Boy, Cherry Bomb, 50 Words for Snow, Deathconsciousness, Isn't Anything, Loveless, m b v, Long Season, E, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and Literally Every SIngle Radiohead B-Side Track (87 of them lmfao)
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
WTF was this even in the second half. It was so promising in the first and then time jump and I was dead.
dark
funny
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character