Book #100: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

First, a quick summary of this classic: there are three brothers and sons of Fyodor Karamazov, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei. Fyodor is the world's worst parent and a pretty horrible person, and everyone knows it. The three (motherless) brothers have grown up thanks to servants taking care of them and other people basically raising them to adulthood. However, they're all grown now, and have all returned to their home town where their father is for short stays, and are becoming reacquainted with him and with each other. There's a lot of deep discussions about right and wrong, about their Karamazovian natures, etc. Then Fyodor is murdered and Dmitri is the immediate suspect, and the second half of the novel is describing the arrest and the trial and the aftermath of the accused patricide.

This book took me a LONG time to read. This is one of those books that is the equivalent of five other books--because of its length, but also because of the difficulty of reading it. It was about 775 pages long, so much shorter than War and Peace or Anna Karenina (the two books I keep comparing it to, since they're both long Russian classics I've read as well), but it felt longer than those because it was heavy. All the summaries and reviews I read of this book talk about how it is a "philosophical treatise on morality" and "a passionate philosophical novel set in 19th century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality." This basically translates to whole chapters being long, LONG monologues from different characters without there being even normal paragraph breaks. Ten whole pages will go by with no dialogue and hardly any new paragraphs--which makes for slow, slow reading. I was determined not to skim and skip things (which happens automatically for me sometimes, when faced with entire pages with no distinguishing breaks), so I moved much slower than I usually do. Add in the fact that it's heavy stuff, talking about our agency and what is right and wrong and debating the existence of God and Christianity--and that makes it even slower. Additionally, the plot was difficult to stay engaged with, and many of the characters (other than Alyosha) were not sympathetic. However, it was easier to follow which character was which and not get confused about who was who, which was nice.

I don't say all of that to say that I didn't like the book. I did, but not as much as War and Peace or AK. I wish I had read this with a class where I could have discussed it and gotten some insight into why things were significant. I read the Sparknotes for each section of the book as I was going, and that helped a lot to give me insight into things that I missed the importance of as I was slogging along through the book. The philosophical elements that I enjoyed thinking about was how much of an effect our natures have on our actions (everyone was always talking about their "Karamazovian natures") and Ivan and Alyosha's disagreements about right and wrong. Ivan believed that if there's no God, there's no afterlife, and everything is permitted and nothing is wrong. This belief, which he talked about a lot and discussed with many people, blows up in his face and ends up driving him insane when the repercussions of it strike him finally. Alyosha was my favorite character, and obviously Dostoevsky's as well--he was angelic and beloved by all and always trying to do good for everyone. I didn't quite understand the need for the character of Father Zosima, the elder at the monastery who was Alyosha's mentor in his attempt to become a monk, and I thought it was super weird how an entire section, out of nowhere, was dedicated to his life story and his beliefs about everyone being responsible for everyone else's actions (I get that it was supposed to be in response to Ivan's atheism, but it seemed super weird). I kept thinking, "This would NEVER be allowed in a book being published today."

All in all, I am glad I read this. I have had this book on my shelf for YEARS and YEARS--I bought a secondhand copy while I was at NCSU, so at least six years ago--and I've always felt lame that I've never gotten around to reading it. I'm trying to work through the books on my shelves that I haven't read yet, and this was a major one. I don't honestly know if I'll want to read it again, though. It really dragged for me, and I don't know if the interesting insights were worth all the pages of blabber it took to get them.

But hey--book 100!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CHECK ME OUT!