I just finished this book, and I'm struggling a little to put my thoughts together. It's by far my favorite of the books I've read this summer, and perhaps the most surprisingly so. Don't get me wrong, I already knew Dostoevsky was a genius having read Crime and Punishment twice for school and analyzed the many many dimensions therein, but this little book made a much heavier impact on me. Maybe I'm just surprised because it was a little tricky to jump into at first, with me reading a page or five and then ditching it for other forms of entertainment (usually tv or movies), but today I forced myself to sit still and really focus on it. I was rewarded with the most intense reading experience I've had in quite some time.
It's not that Notes is by any means a thrilling tale-- it's literally one guy narrating bits and pieces from his dismal little life in 19th century Russia. The narrator isn't likeable (intentionally so, but all the same...), and you're not really rooting for him in the way you might expect. But the examination of his interior monologue as well as his interactions with the world around him is hugely satisfying. Dostoevsky is just fantastic at sketching psychologically intriguing characters who are almost frighteningly relateable (though this narrator slightly less so than Raskolnikov, because he at least commits no murders). Something that I always have as a goal with characterization, and something I admire in all my favorite writers, is to have a moment (several if the writer is truly gifted) where, no matter what the character's circumstances, personality, et al, the reader thinks to him/herself "Yes! I know exactly what he/she means!" Take me, for example: I am obviously not an impoverished, largely misanthropic man living in 19th century Russia, but there are countless moments in this book where the narrator articulates nearly verbatim thoughts that I have had in my recent life (though of course, given that it's Dostoevsky, his are much more eloquent). The second half of the book in particular, when we move from the narrator's musings to seeing how his views impact his interactions with other people, hits home in a way that, given some of the waxing philosophical in the book's opening, I wasn't necessarily expecting.
The other thing that really got me about this book is how quietly tragic it is. I found myself tearing up during the last 20 pages or so, and it took me some time to figure out why. It was the attitude with which the narrator closed the book that really got me, his discussion about the way people want the world to look as opposed to the way it actually is, and our collective tendency to get caught up in notions of heroes and good stories and be bored and disappointed by our reality. And it dawned on me was that I was a mess precisely because this character and his thoughts were so relateable, and then he arrives at this sort of hopeless conclusion about life and how we're destined to live it. Way to bring me down, F.D. (don't worry, it was in the best way).
Additionally, I firmly believe that this should be on the curriculum somewhere for college students. It's a coming of age story-- well, not really, it's more of a coming to consciousness story, I guess-- but it grapples with the very kind of existential crisis that us post-adolescent intellectuals face. So get on that, professors of America.
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