I guess by late spring I had read several non fiction books and I was looking for a change in pace. For some reason or other I picked up Crime and Punishment again. Also for some reason, I wrote in the book when I finished it for the first time. I finished it on November 22, 2002, at 12:30 am. I must have been proud. I was living in Peach Tree apartments in Martin and spending my lunches at the park in Union City where I probably read most of this. I was proud again on August 3, 2017 at 11:00 pm. It took me most of the summer. When you say, hey this is a Dostoevsky book that was translated from Russian to English, it makes in sound hard. But in reality, if you can read hard books written in English, you can read any translated book. English is the hardest.
Anyway, a few take aways....Raskolnikov is a total self absorbed asshole for 503 pages of this book, then falls in love with Sonia while he is a prisoner in Siberia, then becomes possibly normal just at the end of the story, page 504. But even in his transformation with love, we really don't know if he actually feels bad for murdering two people.
The interrogation by Porfiry Petrovitch heavily reminded me of Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Bastards. He starts off as your friend in a far direction and works his way in.
Apparently people in Russia have two separate names, a formal type and an casual type, like a nickname. That, and the names that seem very similar, can make following the plot a little tricky.
What makes this book so long is not the page count, but the lack of short, declarative, narrative. There are many series of pages with no paragraph breaks, much less narrative quotes.
I am not going to write an essay on the genius of Dostoevsky, he definitely took care of business. His novels read like a psychology and philosophy text book with a plot. My favorite lines are the zombie apocalypse dream he describes to Sonia in the last few pages.
Anyway, I am ready to move on to a little easier pace of books. Maybe I will get back with old Raskolnikov, Sonia, Dounia, and company in another 15 years or so.
