Monday, October 16, 2006

Idiot?

I have been reading Dostoyevsky's Idiot for at least a month now. I love Russian literature, and am not daunted by thick books. This one, however, just doesn't seem to get going, although I am well into Book 2 - it is as if D is just introducing and introducing and introducing, be it characters or backgrounds or events that'll probably start unfolding, or whatever, but nothing actually ever starts. I shall have to nip into the library tomorrow to renew it - again. They'll probably think I am illiterate.

I have noticed the computer behaves funny (this is indeed the technical term for it) whenever I visit one of the Iraqi blog sites I have discovered in the last week or so - it goes all slow at obeying orders - I mean *even slower* than usual. I wonder why this is.

2 comments:

nmj said...

Ah, I took 'The Idiot' on holiday in 1992, and I dreaded those pages, it was so hot and yet I forced myself to finish that damn book, the only Dostoevsky I have read! . . . I always have to renew my library books, you get 3 weeks here but it's never enough. Am still trying with 'The Accidental'.

Anna MR said...

I read the one variously translated as "The Possessed" or "Devils" in English, you know, the one with Stavrogin and Verhovensky, a couple of years ago, and found that a riveting read and a startling analysis on the nature of terrorism...and then I read "Crime & Punishment" in my teens. It is my plan to work my way through the enitre body of D's work - although I realise this is a looong, looong term plan.