Scan barcode
A review by hadeanstars
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3.0
In a word, difficult.
Even if a novel doesn't really click for me in the first few pages, I can persevere and know that usually, by the time I am a quarter of the way through, I will be in the groove with it and the rest will be easy. So I assumed with Dostoevsky's great work. I read to the quarter mark and found it a bit of a mystery. It seemed to be a long treatise on 19th Century church doctrine for the most part. But I persevered, thinking that by the time I got half way through it was bound to become easier. It's a massive book too, so half way through was a good novel's worth by any normal standard. It got better. A little. At least the characters became more apparent and the beginnings of a plot emerged. The trouble I was having now was that the central characters, Mitya and Grushenka, were so manic. They seemed as though they had some sort of personality disorder shared between them. I struggled to relate to them in any ordinary way. The pious and rather woolly Alyosha was not much easier to relate to, and the third brother Ivan had not made much of an appearance by this stage.
There were compensations because Karamazov is not entirely a single novel, but in many ways a collection of loosely connected pastiches, describing the lives and misadventures of various characters. Some of these interludes were highly amusing. But on the whole, the logic of the major characters and of the novel itself eluded me.
I am not certain if Dostoevsky writes about madness with a particular fondness, or if instead the Russian character of his time was habitually a little cracked, but where is the difference? I found Raskolnikov's madness in Crime and Punishment much easier to relate to (if considerably less amenable to that of Mitya!)
It took aboput two thirds of the book to find the central plot, which, in fairness to Dostoevsky, had been developing all along, albeit often subtly enough that it was not immediately apparent. The final part was much better in my view and rescued the novel for me. But Brothers Karamazov is for me rather like a film that's an hour or more too long, and getting through the first half almost negates the value of the overall project.
Ultimately I'm glad to have read it, but I'm also delighted that I'll not have to read it again.
Even if a novel doesn't really click for me in the first few pages, I can persevere and know that usually, by the time I am a quarter of the way through, I will be in the groove with it and the rest will be easy. So I assumed with Dostoevsky's great work. I read to the quarter mark and found it a bit of a mystery. It seemed to be a long treatise on 19th Century church doctrine for the most part. But I persevered, thinking that by the time I got half way through it was bound to become easier. It's a massive book too, so half way through was a good novel's worth by any normal standard. It got better. A little. At least the characters became more apparent and the beginnings of a plot emerged. The trouble I was having now was that the central characters, Mitya and Grushenka, were so manic. They seemed as though they had some sort of personality disorder shared between them. I struggled to relate to them in any ordinary way. The pious and rather woolly Alyosha was not much easier to relate to, and the third brother Ivan had not made much of an appearance by this stage.
There were compensations because Karamazov is not entirely a single novel, but in many ways a collection of loosely connected pastiches, describing the lives and misadventures of various characters. Some of these interludes were highly amusing. But on the whole, the logic of the major characters and of the novel itself eluded me.
I am not certain if Dostoevsky writes about madness with a particular fondness, or if instead the Russian character of his time was habitually a little cracked, but where is the difference? I found Raskolnikov's madness in Crime and Punishment much easier to relate to (if considerably less amenable to that of Mitya!)
It took aboput two thirds of the book to find the central plot, which, in fairness to Dostoevsky, had been developing all along, albeit often subtly enough that it was not immediately apparent. The final part was much better in my view and rescued the novel for me. But Brothers Karamazov is for me rather like a film that's an hour or more too long, and getting through the first half almost negates the value of the overall project.
Ultimately I'm glad to have read it, but I'm also delighted that I'll not have to read it again.