Crime and Punishment

I have finished Crime and Punishment! This feels like an enormous achievement, given the confusing names, density of the text and scale of the concepts involved. It is a hard but satisfying read, and I'd recommend it, as long as you have a bit of time on your hands...which I didn't, hence the time it has taken me to get through.

There is a lot to consider in this book. First, the main storyline - Rodion commits a murder, in the belief that he is one of a special breed of men who have responsibility to carry out grand actions to change the course of society and therefore are above the law. Even in the act of the murder, his conscience leads him to doubt this and he spirals into a madness driven by his guilt & conflicted conscience. The remainder of the novel then follows him as he wrestles with whether he should confess, flee or kill himself - which is most honourable, will he be found out etc.

The events of this work are then, in the main, viewed through a filter of his madness, and you can never quite be sure whether they are as they seem, or they are his interpretation. For example, Svidrigailoff enters the narrative in pursuit of Rodion's sister, discovers his guilt and then tries to use this to convince the sister to marry him. This conflict leads him too into madness. However, before he reachs this point, he toys with Rodion. On one occasion, Rodion (in one of his many fevered wanderings of the streets) believes he is going to Svidrigailoff's home, and instead ends up in a completely different part of the city, where he sees Svidrigailoff in the window of a tea house. He sees this as fate, coincidence etc, but Svidrigailoff says that he has told Rodion to meet him there...he has no recollection. There are many of these coincidental events throughout, and this gives an insight - perhaps they are not fate, driving Rodion towards a confession, as he believes, but normal, planned meetings, which he is misinterpreting due to the depth of his confusion & madness!

Catherine Ivanovna adds a welcome lightness to the mid-part of the novel - in particular, the funeral dinner following the death of her husband is the only section that made me smile. The fact that a funeral dinner is the funniest part of the work does give an indication of its bleakness! All of the key characters are subsisting at the lowest echelons of society, hand-to-mouth in terms of their financial situation, and at the mercy of those with money and position. It highlights how the justice system did not really offer justice for the poor, but just for those with the most influential voice, and those with money have a disproportionate amount of power & influence over those without. This is obviously not a new idea in society, lest you think I believe I'm making a revolutionary observation, but it does come across very starkly here.

I won't give away the ending, as I would highly recommend reading it, but will just say that it resolves, and felt like a satisfactory conclusion (take note, Grapes of Wrath - this is how to finish!). I feel like I have achieved something in this one - it was hard work, but it was worthy of the hard work.

Phew. Now to some shopping. And perhaps Lord of the Rings next!

Crime and Punishment #1

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...