I shall be taking a break over the holiday period, but expect to be back posting here in the New Year. In the meantime, may I wish you all a very Merry Christmas. And hopefully, we’ll meet up again – in a manner of speaking , that is – in the New year.
Archive for December, 2010
22 Dec
“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens
Everyone knows A Christmas Carol. It’s about as famous as the story of Christ’s Nativity itself. Even those who have never opened a book know at least the outline of the story. No matter how frequently it is derided for its tweeness or for its alleged sentimentality (usually by those who haven’t read it), its [...]
20 Dec
A Karamazov Diary: 11 – Presences
The 19th century is usually regarded as the high-water mark of the realist novel, but I don’t know that it makes much sense to regard The Brothers Karamazov from such a perspective. One can do so, of course, but viewed from a strictly realist perspective, the novel is bound to emerge, I think, as deeply [...]
19 Dec
A Karamazov Diary: 10 – Ivan
The Brothers Karamazov is, on one level, a thriller with many unexpected twists and turns in the plot. But it is not possible to discuss the character of Ivan without giving away some of these twists and turns. So if you haven’t yet read the book, but plan to, and don’t want the twists of [...]
18 Dec
A Karamazov Diary: 9 – Alyosha
Dostoyevsky states quite clearly at the very start that Alyosha is the hero, the principal protagonist of the novel, but I doubt too many readers can qute see it this way. It is not of course the first time that Dostoyevsky had attempted to depict a perfectly good, even saintly, person: there had been Prince [...]
17 Dec
A Karamazov Diary: 8 – Children
The subplot in The Brothers Karamazov concerning children seems to be tacked on almost as a sort of afterthought, so it’s a bit surprising to read that the entire novel was initially intended to be primarily about children. Obviously, Dostoyevsky’s conception changed radically, but the idea of writing about children, however imperfectly realised in the [...]
16 Dec
“…but that would be boasting”
When biologist Lewis Thomas was asked what message he would choose to send into outer space in the Voyager spacecraft, he said: “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach … but that would be boasting.” I wish I knew how to write about music. As with so much else, I do not [...]
12 Dec
A Karamazov Diary: 7 – Dmitri
About half way through the novel, after that extraordinary chapter in which Alyosha seems to experience a moment of transcendence, we are brought very much back to earth with Dimitri. And over the next two hundred or so pages, Dostoyevsky gives us what amounts to almost a steady crescendo, the atmosphere intensifying by the page [...]
8 Dec
A Karamazov Diary: 6 – Puzzles and challenges
Friends ask me if I am enjoying The Brothers Karamazov. Normally, it would seem a reasonable question to ask, but somehow, with this particular novel, it seems almost irrelevant. It’s a novel that I often find very strange: it puzzles me, and it frequently infuriates me. But at the same time, it also intrigues me, [...]
6 Dec
A Karamazov Diary: 5 – Irrationality
The 19th century novel is usually described as “realistic”. It seems to me a strange description given that at least four major novelists of the 19th century – Gogol, Dickens, Melville and Dostoyevsky – seemed to have no interest at all in surface realism. But Dostoyevsky seems, if anything, and anti-realist writer. Far from exploring [...]
