Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Interlude: The Brothers K

Wait, I can hear you say, this post isn’t a part of the Graduation series, what’s going on here? Fear not, faithful readers, we will return to our regularly scheduled Graduation series momentarily. But I finished reading Dostoevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov’ this summer after I got home, and given that this book was also something of an odyssey for me, felt I had to give it a review. Some context first. As a part of my effort to familiarize myself more with some of the great authors and with classic works of literature, I began reading this book last summer, between my junior & senior years, before I read C&P. I finished about 2/3 of it before fall of my final year began, and then once school got underway, especially with a literature class to read for, I just could not seem to get through it. I came back and picked it up a few times, but couldn’t make any real headway on it. I read C&P during the spring of my senior year, and had gone through enough of Brothers K to know I liked C&P better. But I still wanted to finish the other book. After graduation I returned home to Seattle with plans to look for a job in finance here on the west coast, preferably in the Bay area. During this downtime when I was considering my future direction and interviewing for jobs I finally finished it.I like Crime and Punishment better, for a few reasons. Brothers K is very sprawling, its as if Dostoevsky just gave himself permission to write whatever he felt like writing. D. is an amazing author, but he already tends to ramble just a bit sometimes in fleshing out his characters and dwelling on tertiary scenes. I felt that D’s writing benefited greatly from a slightly more structured format like the one in C&P, which is more focused and feels more planned.The other big strike against Brothers K is that I didn’t fall in love with the characters nearly the same way I did in C&P. D. still did an extraordinary job of fleshing the people in his story out, making them feel real enough to walk right off the page. But I found myself not really caring very much, especially since the book’s ‘big mystery’ of who killed the elder Karamazov is pretty much known to the reader. So it took out some of the tension. The final scene in the book however I found very powerful and very moving. I’m not event totally sure what it meant, but perhaps that mystery was part of the magic.Don’t get me wrong, this is a great book, and D. says some very important things through the mouths of his characters. The book is great if you just read Ivan’s speeches, who is the most philosophical of the three brothers. But if one was going to only read one of D’s books, I’d suggest going with C&P. Besides, it’s shorter.

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