Finally finding enough space to get on with something akin to sustained reading. Made reasonable progress in The Idiot today and got to the end of Part 1. Gripping stuff, by the way. The sequence of Nastasya Filippovna throwing the money on the fire in front of a house full of visitors on the evening of Prince Myshkin's first day in Petersburg is Dostoevsky at his edgy, scandalous best. On the surface it's impossible to understand or predict how his characters will behave, yet there's a strange dream logic to it all that makes events appear inevitable, no matter how crazy things get.
It's lucky I chose to read The Idiot over this recent period. I think I would have officially abandoned almost any other novel. But even just reading a couple of pages in a day has been enough to hold me tight to the novel and its strange story. Dostoevsky, like Dickens I suppose - I can't think of any other writer to compare him to - creates his own world. It runs parallel to ours, but seems to operate on somewhat different rules. But there's nothing of Dickensian comfort in the Russian Master's odd world. Things always seem to be teetering on the edge of some necessary disaster.
And what exactly is it all supposed to mean? Like Kafka, I'm not sure I really want to find out, even if I could.
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