The Brothers Karamazov

Hola, mes bons amis. This is blog book review numero uno. If you know me well, then you now that I've always loved to read. You might wonder, then, why I haven't done a book review before. The reason is this! I haven't actually finished a book in months. This can be attributed to a couple factors; one is that my book was over 700 pages long. Another is that listening to podcasts is generally far easier than reading, so I haven't been doing a whole lot of reading lately. But yesterday, I finally finished the grand, enormous The Brothers Karamazov by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In this novel, Dostoevsky sometimes takes the first person view as an eyewitness to the actions taking place and sometimes just uses the limited third person, focusing on various different characters. In fact, he combines these two voices quite seamlessly. When writing in the first person, Dostoevsky speaks with humility, and treats the reader as an equal in watching the events of the story unfold.

In most fiction novels, the plot is the main focus. That is not the case in The Brothers Karamazov. In fact, the plot of this book is really quite slow and lacking in action. There is really one major plot development, which only occurs after about 400 or 500 pages of character development. Another unique aspect of this novel is that Dostoevsky pretty much lets you know what's going to happen in the plot well before it actually happens. In fact, there is only one unanticipated plot point in the book, and it is not particularly vital to the overall story.

Like I said, there is very extensive character development in this novel; in fact, that is the main focal point of the story. This book has an exorbitant number of main characters. Really, you need detailed graphs to keep them all straight. Well, I figured it out after a few hundred pages, but it is confusing at first. The great thing about Dostoevsky's character development is that he doesn't portray any characters as simply evil or good. Every character contains attributes of goodness and evil, and Dostoevsky spends countless pages examining his characters' moral and spiritual ambiguities. In spite of the lack of plot, this book was extremely entertaining, because of the way it looks at people and relationships. The major themes of this novel are romance, familial relationships, crime and punishment, religion and theology, sin and redemption. I very highly recommend The Brothers Karamazov if you are prepared to make a deep emotional and temporal commitment.

Ok, that's enough. Check back tomorrow for an audio blog with a brand new server. Ok, have a great day! Au revoir, mes petits chemins de fer.

Jill