After Steinbeck & Rushdie, I went for something a bit more lightweight - the Hobbit. I wanted to then go onto something also fairly light - but started Crime and Punishment instead!
Now, I haven't finished this yet - it's been a pretty busy week and it's a pretty heavy book - but there's a lot in it and I'll probably forget my thoughts so far if I don't write about it part-way through!
One observation that made me chuckle - Roskolnikov's mother has just arrived, and is described as retaining some traces of her former beauty, despite being on the verge of old age - she is 43. Imagine the slating that an author writing now would get for defining a 43 year old woman as being on the verge of old age! Having said that, a chuckle is in a sense the wrong response - this is really just a reflection of firstly the general increase in life expectancy, and also the extreme poverty & harsh life lived by the characters in this novel would, I'd imagine, cause a woman to age at a far quicker rate than us in our more cosseted life here with anti-ageing creams and hair dyes and moisturisers proven to address the seven signs of ageing...
For those who aren't familiar with the novel, Crime and Punshment is set in pre-Revolutionary Tsarist Russia. Rodia Raskolnikov decides to carry out a murder for financial reasons, but also as a matter of principle - ridding the world of the evils of a money-lender who also conveniently happens to have riches that can be stolen after the event. Following this event (it isn't giving much away to tell you that he does it!), Dostoevsky examines the effect of guilt on Raskolnikov and his subsequent actions.
The first thing to say, I think, is that for the first time in this challenge I am absolutely gripped by the book I am reading. I was starting to worry that the 52 books I'd already read would turn out to be the only ones I like, and that it would be a year (or so) of forcing myself through depressing and overly complex works! This is complex - even to the extent that each of the characters seems to be referred to by two or three different names, and it has taken me until about the halfway point to really know who the characters are - and is certainly not a light or cheerful read. However, it is so well constructed that I have been completely drawn into the darkness of Raskolnikov's growing madness/illness/panic, and want to know where it is going next.
As I mentioned, the mother & sister have just entered the equation, and the depiction of dignity within poverty is striking.
More to follow when I finish! By the way, I'm reading the Wordsworth Classics version, which is giving me an eerie sense of doing my English A-level homework...
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