crime or Karamazov?I don't remember it using an intentionally bad prose style... maybe it depends on the translation.
Karamovoz is full of useless qualifiers, 'and then maybe perhaps the tree was big and tall, if I can so myself.' The intentionally poor narration is something that is genuinely accepted by scholarship on the book.I've never heard Dostoyevsky wrote badly, or badly on purpose.
Dostoyevsky’s roughness, despite the rush and the pressure, was all deliberate. No matter what the deadline, if he didn’t like what he had, he would throw it all out and start again. So this so-called clumsiness is seen in his drafts, the way he works on it. It’s deliberate. His narrator is not him; it’s always a bad provincial writer who has an unpolished quality but is deeply expressive. In the beginning of ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ in the note to the reader, there is the passage about ‘being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.’ He stumbles. It’s all over the place
The style of The Brothers Karamazov is based on the spoken, not the written, word. Dostoevsky composed in voices. We know from his notebooks and letters how he gathered the phrases, mannerisms, verbal tics from which a Fyodor Pavlovich or a Smerdyakov would emerge, and how he would try out these voices....The publication of his notebooks in the 1930s finally dispelled the old prejudice that Dostoevsky was a careless and indifferent stylist. All the oddities of his prose are deliberate; they are a sort of "learned ignorance," a willed imperfection of artistic means, that is essential to his vision.
Luka recommended Brothers to me and seeing the ellroy praise earlier I think somethings clicked.
It's like one of those holiday review things "Saw the pyramids, not that great really" - "Walked by Grand Canyon, overrated".
I wish I could distil all the really good bits of GR into a book about half or two-thirds as long, and leave out all the bits where he's trying to be funny, sexy, or - god help us - "zany". Not to mention all the terrible bloody songs.Can't believe you're reading that rural rubbish instead of finishing Gravity's Rainbow.
Crime... never read the Bros I have to admit.crime or Karamazov?
I would expect you to love all that stuffI wish I could distil all the really good bits of GR into a book about half or two-thirds as long, and leave out all the bits where he's trying to be funny, sexy, or - god help us - "zany". Not to mention all the terrible bloody songs.
I thought CP was fantastic.