To be blunt, I loved it. Disclosure: I read the P&V translation.
I certainly can recommend it but to be honest it was probably not a wise choice for a first Dostoevsky book, because it is a rather heavy book to read. (I don’t mean in terms of size, but in terms of how he can write pages and pages and pages of words to describe someone getting up and moving to a chair across the room.)
It was also the first book I read for personal reasons that I actually took notes on while reading. I feel it was critical to really comprehend and grasp the story, since to be quite blunt, Dostoevsky’s prose can be a little hiccupy often. I think I’m gonna do that a lot more now when I read.
But now that this hurdle is out of the way I think I’m going to relax with a simpler book this time. Maybe another Fante book.
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by oh_please_god_no
1 Comment
Glad you liked it. I’m surprised that you found it this challenging. Compared to his other works (The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot)or even other Russian authors (Tolstoy – War and Peace), I think this was probably the most approachable of them all that I have read so far.