Now firmly embarked on The Brothers Karamazov, having reached the end of Book 1. Astonishing stuff, even for a hardened reader of Dostoevsky. I thought there might be some build-up to the first provocatively 'scandalous' scene, but that came almost immediately and the pace hasn't slowed down since. Almost all the Karamazovs are crazy, but since no one else in the novel approaches any reasonable level of sanity this hardly matters.
And FD leaves you in no doubt he's dealing with the deepest questions of human existence amidst the crazy extremes.
I'm loving every page. (And it helps that I reckon that translators Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky really capture the idiomatically varied individual voices of the charaters. Of course, I have no idea what's in the Russian but none of the other translations I've read of the earlier novels gave me such a strong sense of that polyphonic variety.)
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