rykiel_bhusal

So vast, in terms of the range of humanity and insights, that it's hard to know where to begin. Great manic talk, characters who are surprising and driven, rich depictions of Russian life, occasionally frustrating tangents. It was sometimes tough to make it through, but so what -- so were Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. Like those novels, this one feels like it earns its place in the canon by sheer ambition and balls -- it takes on the biggest human questions, tries to deal with them squarely (sometimes to the detriment of the story), and feels stuffed full of humanity. I can't think of anything quite like it, not even Crime and Punishment or other Dostoyevsky works. I felt the trial descended into tediousness and repetition, unfortunately, which steals a lot of thunder from the last couple hundred pages. Perhaps because it was serialized, the novel needed to bring all the facts together and hash them over at great length to remind readers what had happened. But to my thinking, the extensive back-and-forth over criminal details didn't always fit neatly with the grand philosophizing the attorneys did. ultimately, i thought it was great in a kind of spectacularly lumbering way -- an elephant of a book. I even liked the Christian proslytyzing here better than in Crime and Punishment. Alyosha's message to the kids can be taken to heart even by humanists, whereas C and P (and Anna K., for that matter) lose their way in the end in their desire to push a message.

2022-11-14 16:14