Crime and Punishment (Penguin Popular Classics)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Penguin Classics 2007, Paperback, 448 pages, £2.00

I have always thought of Crime and Punishment with a little wince of guilt, as I based part of the dissertation for my degree on the Raskolnikov character without actually having read the original text, so I’d avoided it until now as I was worried that I might have been completely mistaken in my borrowed analysis, so it was with an increasing sense of relief that I turned the pages and discovered a tight, stifling portrait of a man struggling with depression and guilt at having failed to live up to his own opinion of himself.

Morality is a malleable thing for the great figures of history, so it’s fine for some people to have murdered and stolen in the story of their lives, as they fit into the story of the world. Raskolnikov studies those figures but finds himself wanting as we meet him in his squalid little room, his studies abandoned and rotting in the corner, and his crime, the murder and burglary of a money-lender and her grand-daughter, can’t be excused.

As we go on his mental illness becomes the sharp focus of the book and I’d come to think of it purely in terms of this picture of a mind in trouble, so I was completely thrown when it spins on its heel and becomes a murder mystery a few hundred pages in. It’s still far from being a 19th century Rebus of St Petersburg but the crime and its detection, investigation and punishment all come into the centre of the narrative for the last section of the book, saving it from being a fascinating but rather too single-minded book about the madness of one man and turning it into a horrible vision of a society full of poverty, class struggle, the class system, misogyny, manners and the morality that might or might not apply to people and their deeds.

The claustrophobia felt by the characters and the sudden lurch from squinting vision of one miserable life to gaping view of a miserable city left me feeling a bit sick. Excellent book, I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

A note on the book itself as a physical object: I bought this in a Penguin edition printed on recycled paper with a bright green cover. Although it seemed like a great idea at the time the pages wrinkled and warped as I read and the text didn’t stand out as sharply as it could have against the dull beige background. For a shorter book that would only be read once, and quickly, it could work, but for something of this stature that I’d like to return to, pay the extra pound and get a better quality version.

Related posts:

1. War of the Worlds by HG Wells (Ian’s book 12, 2009)
2. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)
3. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction by Martin Priestman (Ed.) (Shane’s book 7, 2010)

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Vintage Classics)

Matthew Pearl (Introduction)
Vintage Classics 2009, Paperback, 160 pages, £5.99

Poe’s hero, C Auguste Dupin, is clearly the progenitor of many a literary detective, not least Sherlock Holmes. Between pipes and from the comfort of his armchair, Dupin picks apart the mysteries as narrated by his slower-witted friend and companion. It’s a formula that would become very familiar indeed.

Dupin appeared in just three stories, all of which are included here. The title story is the most famous and the most successful. The story of two women slain in their locked apartment may have a fairly silly conclusion but the approach Dupin takes to solving the puzzle is a familiar one. His analysis of newspaper reports of the crime and his careful examination of the scene allow him to determine the identity of the killer.

In the second story, The Mystery of Marie Roget, Poe transposes a real-life New York murder to Paris and has Dupin show that the assumptions made by police are likely to be wrong. Since the real murder remained unsolved, so does Poe’s fictionalised version, which makes for an unsatisfying read. All that is here is Dupin’s dissection of a series of newspaper reports. It’s repetitive and dull but it does at least have the distinction of being, in all likelihood, the first detective story to be based on a real crime.

The Purloined Letter, the third and final outing for Dupin, closes the collection. As a mystery, it’s more satisfying than …Rue Morgue. It’s also nowhere near as silly. However, as a story it remains – like …Marie Roget – rather flat.

All three stories are important and influential. However, the modern reader is unlikely to find them very entertaining.

Related posts:

1. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)
2. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)
3. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Shane’s book 26, 2009)

Hunger

Knut Hamsun
Canongate Books Ltd 2006, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

The writer, who remains unnamed, cannot afford food and eventually becomes homeless. We follow his train of thought, his rantings and his bizarre ideas as he teeters on the edge of madness. He’s an egotist whose reach, it seems, exceeds his grasp when it comes to writing but he’s not dislikable.

In his introduction to this edition, Paul Auster argues that it is impossible to empathise with the narrator but I found the opposite. While he can be frustrating at times and the pranks he plays on various strangers are bizarre, I found myself sympathising with his predicament.

The writer swings between pride and desperation, sometimes refusing help and at other times begging people for assistance. He always seems to misjudge the situation, begging those who won’t help him and refusing those who want to help. Throughout, Hamsun makes him utterly convincing.

Hunger has been translated three times and this translation, by Sverre Lyngstad, is excellent. At the end of the book is an essay by Lyngstad in which he compares the previous translations with his own. He’s merciless in his dissection of the mistakes of his predecessors, which makes the essay quite amusing but it’s also a good illustration of the challenges a translator faces.

Hamsun was a fervent supporter of the Nazis in his old age, somewhat clouding his Nobel Prize-winning career. Regardless of what became of its author, this book is a must-read.

Related posts:

1. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Shane’s book 17, 2010)
2. Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler and Robert B Parker (Ian’s book 10, 2009)
3. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (Shane’s book 25, 2009)

Dead Souls (Penguin Classics)

Nikolai Gogol
Penguin Classics 2004, Paperback, 512 pages, £9.99

Dead Souls is a social satire detailing the efforts of Chichikov, a mid-ranking gentleman turned social-climbing conman, as he travels the Russian provinces with a bizarre plan. Chichikov approaches landowners and offers to “buy” those of their peasants who have died since the last census. Russian law at the time dictated that landowners had to pay tax on the serfs they had at the last census, regardless of whether they are still alive. By taking these ‘dead souls’ off the hands of the landowners, Chichikov appears to be doing them a favour. But what does he want them for?

His plan is little more than a MacGuffin and not terribly important to the novel. Instead, the focus is on Gogol’s portrayal of the various landowners Chichikov meets. For Gogol, they too are dead souls, as is Chichikov himself.

Gogol’s writing, translated here by Robert A Maguire, is exquisite. There is some wonderfully descriptive writing and his characters are drawn with wit and precision. Gogol’s narrator is endearingly strange, frequently wandering off into poetic asides about the state of Russia or a certain kind of person.

It’s a voice that would nowadays be described as postmodern. At one point the narrator apologises for the characters he’s bringing to us: “And so, readers should not feel indignant towards the author if the persons who have been appearing so far have not been to their taste. This is Chichikov’s fault, he is fully in charge here, and wherever he takes it into his head to go, we must plod along in the same direction too.”

The Penguin edition presents the scraps of Gogol’s second volume after the first. It’s worth reading as a curiosity but is altogether more cumbersome, with a heavier tone and no clear sense of direction. Of course, it’s highly unlikely to be anything like what Gogol would have wished to have published.

Clearly, Dead Souls should be judged solely on the first part. Elements of it reach across to Dostoevsky, back to Homer and extend forwards to Kafka. It’s a masterpiece and essential reading for all.

Related posts:

1. Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridason (Shane’s book 33, 2009)
2. Rabbit Redux by John Updike (James’s book 50, 2009)
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Ian’s book 4, 2010)

Rock Crystal (Jewel)

Adelbert Sifter
Pushkin Press 2000, Paperback, 80 pages, £5.00

It’s a very slim volume that contains a single story of two children who get lost on in a snowstorm while crossing an Alpine pass on Christmas Eve. They struggle against tiredness, and are saved because their grandmother has given them a flask of coffee extract to take to their mother. They drink the coffee extract – their first encounter with any kind of stimulant – and make it through to the morning as a result.

It’s a beautifully written miniature that recalls the central episode in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain when Hans Castorp loses himself – literally and metaphorically – while skiing in a snowstorm. There’s no introductory essay here, so it’s hard to know if this correspondence is relevant – had Mann read Rock Crystal? – or whether it is just incidental. According to Wikipedia, Mann knew and admired Stifter’s work, saying he was “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature”, so I think that the link must at least be subconscious, if not more than that.

Rock Crystal has the delightful feel of a fairy tale, with a constant sense of dread hanging over the beautifully described action. It’s a tiny, perfectly-formed masterpiece.

Related posts:

1. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (James’s book 39, 2009)
2. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (James’s book 59, 2009)
3. Dubliners by James Joyce (James’s book 6, 2010)

The War of the Worlds

Brian Aldiss (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2005, Paperback, 240 pages, £7.99

It’s been sitting on the bookshelf for almost as long as I can remember too, a leftover from an effort to make an Amazon order up to the free delivery price years ago. Finally I got round to opening it up and I can’t say I’m any less curious having read it.

Like a lot of Victorian and Edwardian books with action in them it’s a yarn. There’s no suspense or action on the part of the protagonists that leads to the resolutions, they’re just bystanders watching the action. The unnamed narrator tours the south of England running away and hiding from the Martians, completely powerless but giving us a picture of the events.

As everyone surely knows, it’s not resistance from the humans that sorts out the invasion but terrestrial diseases that they have no immunity to. As we work towards that we see only two fighting machines being destroyed by earthly weapons (one by a lucky shot and one by a suicidal ramming ship crew) and the total breakdown of English society.

Narrator guy runs around trying to get to his wife who he sent to Leatherhead in the early chapters, meets some people who are equally useless, and eventually sees the final death of the invaders. The death scene itself is rather moving, as the human personal voice seems to step to one side to describe the lingering hoplessness more objectively. As soon as they’re dead, we’re back to hiding in taxi huts and not really knowing what to do.

Contemporary references abound which means you spend a lot of time flicking to the footnotes at the back, which is a bit of a pain for such a lightweight text. It’s like listening to Lenny Bruce.

Life is hopeless, this book seems to say. You don’t really have any control over anything and big schemes come to nothing, no matter how superior your intelligence or technology might be. Run around and look for your wife, there’s no real point to anything.

Is that really the subtext of this incredibly famous book? That there’s no meaning to life and you might as well just hide under a hedge until everything goes away? Curious.

Related posts:

1. Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter (James’s book 23, 2009)
2. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (Shane’s book 15, 2010)
3. Your Face Tomorrow. 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías (James’s book 1, 2010)

It’s frankly not really worth of any attention. It’s overwrought, hysterical, silly, baroque and tedious. Thankfully it’s short.

Venus in Furs (Penguin Classics)

Larry Wolff (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 160 pages, £8.99

Penguin bill it as “as shocking exploration of masochism”, but in fact it has no power to shock us now. It all feels a bit like a strange mix between Sunset Boulevard and the Carry On films.

Without the ability to shock, the writing is left staid and repetitive. It is also, and this I didn’t expect at all, revoltingly mawkish. There is not one character here who we can care about or empathise with, and no writing that catches the imagination.

Related posts:

1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (Shane’s book 25, 2009)
2. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (Shane’s book 22, 2009)

I hadn’t read it before, in fact my knowledge of the classics is so poor that I barely knew the story. If you’re like me, here’s a summary: It’s been 20 years since Odysseus left Ithaca to fight the Trojan War. In the meantime more than 100 suitors have descended on his home in an attempt to woo his wife Penelope and convince her that her husband is dead. Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, sets out to find news of his father, who is alive but whose journey home has been thwarted by the gods and a series of adventures.

The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)

Bernard Knox (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 1997, Paperback, 560 pages, £14.99

As James noted in his review last year, the structure of The Odyssey is remarkably complex. Odysseus, our hero, doesn’t appear for some time and when he does his story is told in both the present and in a series of flashbacks. It’s even more impressive when you realise that this story would have been told orally. It requires an attentive audience.

Both orator and audience would have been helped by the poem’s repetitive nature. Certain phrases and rituals are repeated throughout, adding an internal rhythm to the narrative.

The oddities of the time make the story hard to relate to in places. Despite his desire to return home, the conventions of hospitality require Odysseus to stop as a guest with those who ask, often for years at a time. He’s not much of one for mercy either, brutally slaughtering the servant women who had sex with the suitors.

Strangest of all, though, is the role of the gods, who pretty much move the humans around like pawns. It makes it hard to get that involved in the story – the gods will do as they like anyway. That may be Homer’s point – it’s not worth worrying about things too much since fate is out of your hands. It’s best to barbecue another pig’s thigh and relax.

Everyone should read The Odyssey because of its importance in the history of literature. It’s an important work but one which, I’m afraid, had little emotional impact on me.

Related posts:

1. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)
2. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)
3. Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler (James’s book 43, 2009)

Fyodor Karamazov has three sons, one, Dmitri, by his first wife and two more, Ivan and Alexei, by his second. Rumour has it that he also fathered an illegitimate fourth son, Smerdyakov, who now works as his servant. Dmitri is a reckless, drunken womaniser like his father. Ivan is a rationalist drawn to atheism by the suffering in the world. Alexei is an idealist, a novice monk and a passionate believer in the goodness of people.

The Brothers Karamazov

Richard Pevear (Translator)
Vintage 1992, Paperback, 816 pages, £9.99

Fyodor and Dmitri are in love with the same woman, Grushenka, a temptress who is not well thought of by the villagers. Adding to the tension between father and son is Dmitri’s insistence that Fyodor owes him money. Dmitri has deserted his fiance, Katerina, to pursue Grushenka and, to complicate the story further, Ivan has fallen in love with Katerina.

When Fyodor is murdered, halfway through the novel, all the evidence points to Dmitri, though both his brothers believe him to be innocent. The second half of the novel is the build-up to Dmitri’s trial.

It’s a long book – 800 pages – and Dostoevsky takes his time setting out the story. For a while it seems that each new character will get a chapter detailing their life so far, which slows the pace of the story down considerably. However, it pays off in the end. Even the seeming digressions, for example the long section devoted to the life and reminiscences of Zosima, Alexei’s elder, prove ultimately to be thematically relevant to the whole.

It was one such digression that, for me, was the highlight of the book. The Grand Inquisitor, the ‘poem’ Ivan relates to Alexei to explain his religious doubt, is so strong that it has been published as a stand-alone piece of philosophy. In it, Jesus returns to Spain in the time of the Inquisition and is arrested. The Grand Inquisitor tells him that he has hindered the work of the Church by offering mankind free will when all people want is to be looked after and kept secure. As a threat to the Church’s control, he will have to be killed.

It could be removed from the novel without any damage to the narrative and yet it, along with the life of Zosima mentioned above, is in fact the heart of the novel. I suppose that could be seen as a weakness. It’s certainly odd for a major part of a novel to be thematically essential but irrelevant to the narrative and yet Dostoevsky gets away with it. It fits with the sedate pace and the sprawling vision of the novel.

The unnamed narrator is happy to spell out his prejudices and frequently offers accounts of events that he did not witness. This drifting between omniscience and subjectivity could also be seen as a flaw in the novel but in fact helps to raise questions about the nature of truth, another of Dostoevsky’s themes.

It’s difficult to praise this novel highly enough. It’s a simple and engaging story examined in the deepest and most profound way. I’d recommend it to all.

Related posts:

1. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (James’s book 41, 2009)

Crime and Punishment

Richard Pevear (Translator)
Vintage Classics 1998, Paperback, 592 pages, £7.99

The student Raskolnikov murders a wizened old money-lender, almost as a thought-experiment – he never actually uses what he steals, but leaves it buried under a stone. He is at odds with everything: society, family, convention, life. He feels himself to be a genius, a new Napoleon for whom laws are irrelevant.

Dostoevsky’s skill is that we still sympathise with such an apparently repugnant character, and still hope that the law won’t catch up with him, inevitable as that is.

Once again, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us a brilliant translation, shorn of the Victorian gloom that seems to surround other renderings, keeping Doestoevsky’s sometimes haphazard, hyper-expressive style.

Ultimately, one is left with the impression of grinding poverty, of mental illness and of the deepest love and compassion.

Related posts:

1. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy (James’s book 46, 2009)
2. The Castle by Franz Kafka (James’s book 58, 2009)