Goal: Achieved
One of my favorite books is Natsume Soseki's And Then... It is the story of a depressed and anxiety-ridden young man in Meiji Japan who drives himself to ruin. I read this book several years ago and upon finishing it was profoundly uncomfortable. But in a weird way, that was part of why I loved it so much. Even though it was negative, I had a
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The part of the book that made me so upset was actually the very end, when Alyosha and the children attend the funeral proceedings for Ilusha. Their friend was dead and the traditions they carried out made no sense to them. For me, the book ending with these children struggling with death was what was so upsetting. (Dmitri is going to Siberia for a crime he didn't commit and Ivan is neither haunted by the devil, crazy or a combination of both, but that's fine. It was the children's experiences that were hard for me to read.)
I was particularly attached to the character of Alyosha, which is probably what kept me reading for the first half of the book. The first half is set-up: here are the characters, here are their conflicts, here are their motivations. It's all maddeningly complex and at the time, I felt that surely some of this must be irrelevant. But then we get to the court room drama part hits we've got all the information is completely necessary to understand where this family is and where they are going. Honestly, the court room aspect of the book was much more griping than I had anticipated it to be. I had never read a book about a trial before and was rather uninterested in that aspect.
I didn't take much from the religious aspect of the book. Ivan's arguments against the existence of God were quite difficult for me to understand. When I read Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, I kept commentary on hand and read that as I read the book to be sure I was "getting" everything, but The Brothers Karamazov was the first one I read, a year prior, and I didn't do with that one.
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