Crime and Punishment
Should I stop reading "crime and punishment"?
This question is really directed at anyone who has finished it and can convince me it is worth while. I have read anna karenina and a few other 19th century novels, so I wasn't expecting the kind of clipped spare prose you get in a lot of modern novels. Plus, I like long dense novels, this is why I bought it.
But still, this book seems to me not long-winded and slow, but just plainly badly written. Everything is described in detail including long sections that aren't immediate relevant to plot or atmosphere or the novel equivalent of mise en scene - it probably has a proper word but I don't know it. And I'm not getting the feeling these details are going to prove relevant later, I get the feeling Dostoyevsky wrote down everything he thought of, like a biographer, following his sudject around but without editing out the irrelevant parts later.
I'm up to page 126 and I want to dump it because although theres a good story in there, it feels like reading a directors cut version of order of the phoenix, twice as long and none of it from new plot.
It occurs to me that it may be a poor translation, maybe so bad it has leeched all the life out of the prose, but this seems a stretch. How much can a translator change a book?
Here's an extract, to give you a bit of a clue, from the start of part 2 - the miserable prince has arrived back to his rooming house after committing a crime-
In this fashion he lay for a very long time. Occasionally he seemed to wake up, and at such moments he would realise that it had been night for a long time now; yet the idea of getting up never entered his head. At last he saw it was light - as good as daylight. He was lying flat-out on the sofa, still paralysed by his recent loss of consciousness. What had reached him were the terrible, desperate cries from the street that he heard regularly every night under his window some time after two o' clock. These it had been that had woken him up just now. 'Ah! That'll be the drunks coming out of the dens,' he thought. 'Its gone 2 am.' And suddenly he leapt up, as though someone had pulled him off the sofa. 'What? Its gone two?' He sat down on the sofa - and then it all came back to him. Suddenly, in a single flash, it all came back.
For that intial second he thought he was going insane. A terrible coldness had seized him; but the coldness was also due to the fever which had begun in him a long time ago, while he had been asleep. Now he was suddenly attacked by an ague so violent that his teeth nearly leapt from his mouth, so violently did they chatter, and his entire body started to shake.
And on and on, until you want to shake the book to get the plot out. So- what does one think?
This question is really directed at anyone who has finished it and can convince me it is worth while. I have read anna karenina and a few other 19th century novels, so I wasn't expecting the kind of clipped spare prose you get in a lot of modern novels. Plus, I like long dense novels, this is why I bought it.
But still, this book seems to me not long-winded and slow, but just plainly badly written. Everything is described in detail including long sections that aren't immediate relevant to plot or atmosphere or the novel equivalent of mise en scene - it probably has a proper word but I don't know it. And I'm not getting the feeling these details are going to prove relevant later, I get the feeling Dostoyevsky wrote down everything he thought of, like a biographer, following his sudject around but without editing out the irrelevant parts later.
I'm up to page 126 and I want to dump it because although theres a good story in there, it feels like reading a directors cut version of order of the phoenix, twice as long and none of it from new plot.
It occurs to me that it may be a poor translation, maybe so bad it has leeched all the life out of the prose, but this seems a stretch. How much can a translator change a book?
Here's an extract, to give you a bit of a clue, from the start of part 2 - the miserable prince has arrived back to his rooming house after committing a crime-
In this fashion he lay for a very long time. Occasionally he seemed to wake up, and at such moments he would realise that it had been night for a long time now; yet the idea of getting up never entered his head. At last he saw it was light - as good as daylight. He was lying flat-out on the sofa, still paralysed by his recent loss of consciousness. What had reached him were the terrible, desperate cries from the street that he heard regularly every night under his window some time after two o' clock. These it had been that had woken him up just now. 'Ah! That'll be the drunks coming out of the dens,' he thought. 'Its gone 2 am.' And suddenly he leapt up, as though someone had pulled him off the sofa. 'What? Its gone two?' He sat down on the sofa - and then it all came back to him. Suddenly, in a single flash, it all came back.
For that intial second he thought he was going insane. A terrible coldness had seized him; but the coldness was also due to the fever which had begun in him a long time ago, while he had been asleep. Now he was suddenly attacked by an ague so violent that his teeth nearly leapt from his mouth, so violently did they chatter, and his entire body started to shake.
And on and on, until you want to shake the book to get the plot out. So- what does one think?