When it comes to buying me books I have fundamentally four
categories of friends (from the largest to the smallest): those who don’t even
try because they are too scared (I feel your pain, and I apologize for being a
snob!), those who try to buy me books and fail miserably, those who ask me what
books I want or directly give me book vouchers (always very much appreciated),
and those who just buy me books and don’t fail miserably (I salute you). This
collection of stories comes from a friend belonging to the last category.
Some of the short stories in the collection I found quite
boring (White Nights above all,
despite being one of the most well-known works in this book), but others I
found absolutely brilliant: A Nasty Story
and The Meek One in particular
not only don’t show any sign of ageing, but they are also so incredibly
touching (I feel no sympathy for the protagonist of the former, and not that
much for that of the latter, but plenty of sympathy for the celebrating family
and the wife and servant respectively).
The Gambler itself
is a wonderful novel(la?) about human weakness – when Dostoevsky describes the
main character’s “system” it appears quite clearly that his own system mustn’t
have been too different. The one issue I found, however, is that after the
bombshell of grandmother’s arrival and her subsequent departure the pace of the
novel slowed down too much and I lost a fair bit of interest, regained only in
the last few pages with the summary of everyone’s lives given by Astley. So
yeah, they probably should have kept on gambling instead of leaving Roulettenburg!!
