I began reading Crime and Punishment a few days ago. It's sometimes fun to speculate about how one's reaction to a book might be colored by the author's reputation—in this case, a large one. With, say, Ulysses, I'm pretty confident I'd ditch it in a minute, or five pages, if not for knowing beforehand that it's one of the most esteemed works of the twentieth century. So you persist, if you persist, partly to try and discover what other people, but not you so far, have discerned. That's the opposite of how I feel about Crime and Punishment! It seems like a pot-boiler, pulpy, overdrawn, fantastical, a melodrama. I'd never guess that it's regarded as a masterpiece of the world's literature, but I'd tear through it just to find out what happens. Will Raskolnikov kill the wretched old pawnbroker? If he does, will he be found out? Will the mass of forward pages unfurl like a police procedural, 19th-century St Petersburg, Russia style? What about his sister, Dunya—will her impending marriage to Luzhin occur? will he turn out to be a self-seeking prig and bully, as foreseen by Raskolnikov?
To give one small example of what I mean by such adjectives as "overdrawn" and "fantastical": you could not say that Dostoevsky makes use of the trope about the "prostitute with a heart of gold" because, in his work, she's a saint, a Christian, a suffering servant. He one-ups sentimental rubbish. He'd be easy to lampoon but I can't set him down.
Dostoevsky: a guilty pleasure.
Of course, I do know something about the author and his reputation, so I can see, too, that the book is going to be a vehicle for exploring various philosophical/religious ideas, such as: Should the goal of life be to achieve a surplus of pleasure over pain and become, in a term not yet invented, self-actualized? The answer to that is going to be a thundering No, but, to tell the truth, I hardly care: I just want to know what's going to happen. One senses that the book was written in a kind of fever—because, while reading, you feel like you've caught it.
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