A book I had never heard of and that I picked
up among the remainders in the holy Waterstones on Torrington Place because a)
it was cheap, b) I have plenty of money from the National Book Tokens to spend
(thanks to a particularly thoughtful boss), c) I loved Disgrace by Coetzee, d) I loved Dostoevsky’s Demons.
The thing is, I liked the idea of the novel way
more than I liked the novel itself. I found Coetzee’s usually wonderful prose too
cumbersome here (of course, he has to give voice to Dostoevsky!), felt that all
the characters (including Dostoevsky himself) were rather uninteresting, and
just struggled with those 200-odd pages of divagations on life and death.
Clearly this book has made me want to read more
Dostoevsky (which I probably will during the Easter holiday – I need to do it
outside of term-time otherwise I won’t be able to focus sufficiently to
understand his deep message, or even just the Russian names!), but to me it was
just a novel with great premises and a (predictably) underwhelming development.
