As predicted, it took awhile for me to come back here after starting
Crime and Punishment, the occasionally cumbersome but still fascinating
novel by Dostoyevsky. I didn't spend the entire last month reading
Dostoyevsky. In fact, somehow I managed to have five books going at
once, though much of October was indeed taken up with Crime and Punishment. I finished this novel about a week ago, but for some reason it has taken me quite some time to write about it here. Even if I knew nothing about this book ahead of time, I think I would be able to tell it wasn't a Western novel, simply because all the time the characters are doing things that I just don't expect or understand. "What are you doing?" I constantly found myself asking these characters. I suppose the majority of what I have read in my life have been by British and American authors, and there's obviously a different sensibility here. These Russian characters are always doing things that I don't really see coming.
My favorite parts of this were the actual murder and the frequent inner monologues of Razkolnikov, the main character who was not quite as comfortable with committing murder as he expected to be. The murder scene itself is one of the most gripping things I've read, though there are other parts of the book that are rather mundane. There will be long sections where Dostoyevsky leaves Razkolnikov behind to concentrate on other characters, and I don't always care about these characters. Like with Dickens, you can sometimes sense he was getting paid by the word.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about place when I'm reading -- not so much the place where the novel is set, but the place where I'm set while reading the novel. With Crime and Punishment, I tried many different spots, including:
The Subway -- not good. This is a book that you need to immerse yourself in. There are some paragraphs that last longer than the time between subway stops.
The Laundromat - It shouldn't work, but it does, probably because there is so much about the main character checking his clothes for evidence after committing the murder. Also, my laundromat tends to be dank and empty and deserted much of the time. If laundromats had existed in 19th Century Russia, I have a feeling they would look like mine.
Out in the sunshine -- Definitely not appropriate for this book. It's not the summer, so I didn't try the beach, but I don't think that would work either.
At home with all but one lamp out -- This is the best spot. I also started listening to classical music while reading this, and that certainly put me in the mood for it. I didn't listen to anything in particular. I just turned on the local classical station. At one point, they played something by Tchaikovsky and later there was another selection by someone whose name sounded Russian. Both worked especially well, though the constant advertisements for the "commercial-free workday from 9 to 12" didn't exactly help take me away to 19th Century St. Petersburg.
