Created at: 2024-07-23
After reading Crime And Punishment I felt like I needed a break from Dostoevsky. The ending of that book had been so fantastic and sad that I felt I couldn't take it again too soon.
Fast forward to yesterday, I've finished Brothers Karamazov and it feels as history repeated itself.
The book plot is very erratic, it is based on the family nucleus of three brothers and their life in the mid 1800's Russia. Full of misery, family drama, social drama, sickness, death, politics, law, and religion.
Each one of the three brothers has a convoluted story. The youngest being a virtuous, ethical, compassionate, and loved-by-everybody monk apprentice (Alyosha), the middle sibling being an intellectual with a distant personality and atheist believes (Ivan), and the older one being a womaniser who indulges in a lot of drinking but honourable to the ones he loves (Dmitry).
There are a lot of passages in the novel that don't end anywhere in terms of plot. These passages are usually about "people chatting" or everyday situations. However, most of these exchanges are full of philosophical takes and behavioural observations in the form of character exchanges.
I feel like reading this type of book in 2024 has spoiled half of the joy. Most of the intellectual discussions in the book have been mainstream for decades (or over a century), and this makes the sharp social observations not feel as shocking as they were when this book was published. Nonetheless, this doesn't diminish the influence of this book, but it is a prejudice to consider when reading the classics.
All in all, incredible book and full of interesting dialogues. It is a book that I'll likely read a second time in future.