Thursday, 25 May 2017

The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of the “big” books that I wanted to read during my wife and daughter’s prolonged stay in Brazil. I succeeded, but at times it was honestly quite hard.

The Idiot started off as possibly my favourite Dostoevsky novel, mostly because Lev is such a wonderful character (or maybe I’m biased and he’s actually just a 19th century Russian version of Forrest Gump?), but after Part I the book just goes on and on a bit too much, and I actually often struggled to keep track of who the characters were (Aglaya and Nastasia in particular merged into one at multiple points).

It’s undeniably my fault to a very large extent – I should have put a more serious effort in reading the book instead of going through most of it during lulls at work (shh…) – but, for want of a better term, after 200 pages I just started to find the book a bit boring. And after dismissing a Dostoevsky novel with a banal word like “boring”, I have officially lost every credibility as a reader/blogger/pseudo-intellectual/human being…

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