Comment

Sep 02, 2016Andrew Kyle Bacon rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
A marvelous book with incredible characterization. Part 1 of the book is an incredible page turner which all takes place in one day's timespan. Part 2 is introduces much of the romantic plot and near the end begins to drag. Part 3 digresses in tangents for awhile, gets lost, but then comes back incredibly toward the end. Part 4, much as part 3 before it, gets bogged down in some (in my opinion) unnecessary details, but the final 100 pages of the novel are some of the best I've ever read. Overall Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" is everything I had heard: an incredible character study, a wonderful story of betrayal and romance, a great allegory of being a good person surrounded by bad people, and an extremely uneven novel. I feel that had Dostoyevsky spent some time editing the novel a bit more it could be trimmed and made quite a bit more effective. That said, it's still one of the finest novels I've ever read, and I'm stunned at the quality of Dostoyevsky's prose and dialogue. At various points in the novel he stops using the "he said/she said" tags all together, but the dialogue flows wonderfully and simply by the way it is written you can tell which specific character is speaking. It's really something. So, overall, the characters are my favorite part of this book.