A local woman’s best intentions were no match for the 600-page hardcover of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Those close to the woman are calling her selection “ambitious” and her misguided attempt “a good try.”
The woman had just finished reading Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander and thought she was up for another “big book.” Sadly, she quickly learned that all long books over 600 pages are not built alike.
It was around the 200-page mark or so when her mind began to wander, thinking about all those sexy, slim beach reads she left in her TBR pile from the summer. Books like You Have a Match, Happy Place, and The True Love Experiment.
It’s not that she hates Karamazov, she actually likes it immensely. It’s just that there are parts she can’t stay awake for. Perhaps it is Dostoevsky’s notoriously dense prose which has a soporific power akin to a whale song or watching paint dry?
Perhaps it is Dostoevsky’s notoriously dense prose which has a soporific power akin to a whale song or watching paint dry?
Or is it just the sheer audacity of the book’s scope that she struggled with? Stronger readers have been left in the wake as the author digresses and starts rambling on about troubles and tribulations of the “Snegiryov household.”
Friends close to the woman paint a picture of a valiant struggle against somnolence. Witnesses say they watched her drop this brick masquerading as a novel onto her face several times while dozing through that one section that jumps in and out of the life and history of Elder Zosima.
Other times the woman would just pass out from the sheer exhaustion of trying to remember and mentally pronounce each new name—Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov? Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova (who is also called Grushenka)? And who the fuck is Ilyushechka?
“She was determined,” commented one fellow book club member. “But ultimately the strain of trying to understand the rationalist and nihilistic ideologies of Russian culture ultimately is what broke her. After she got through the plot deviations of Book 4, you could tell that something changed inside of her. This was just one book she wasn’t going to finish.”
At one point the woman searched online for an abridged version, but fueled by her guilt, ambition, and dedication to the 37 followers of her Bookstagram account “@Lit_Lady_Living_Her_Best_Life,” she attempted to stick with the author’s original text and see this thing through.
But ff you check her Goodreads, the book is still lableled as “reading.” Currently, he book resides under a pile of romance novels and some books from the Read with Jenna book club. The woman figures she’ll knock out some trashy little quickies before trying to revisit the book that has been questionably called “a supreme achievement in modern world literature.”
But some of her Die-hard Dostoevsky followers have criticized her. One snarky comment read, “Just because it took the author two years to write, doesn’t mean that it should take you two years to finish.” Others applaud her persistence and see it as a testament to the power of literature (even if that power involves rendering readers unconscious.)
The woman finally took to a Booktok video to address her ongoing journey. “The weird erotic rivalries and parts with the triangular love affairs were great, but I caught myself dozing each time the family started yelling at each other for no reason, which was often.”
She continued.
"I fell asleep at one point and even think I hallucinated that one character was talking to the devil. Let’s just say that things are starting to get super weird.”