Crime, Punishment and Occasional Bewilderment

Well, cross that one off the bucket list. Finally. Last night I finished reading Crime and Punishment. It's taken a while, and I had to read two other books in the middle of it for a rest. It's not that Dostoyevsky's prose is denser and less accessible than that of any other 19^th Century author – what really got me were the names. Allow me to explain.

The crime in question is committed by the splendidly alliterative Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikoff (this is not a spoiler – the dramatis personae lists him as 'Student and Murderer'). Raskolnikoff kills an old moneylender and her sister in what initially appears to be a fairly amateurish robbery, and Dostoyevsky charts his consequent mental disintegration amidst a colourful cast of people with irritatingly similar names.

Perhaps I just haven't read enough Russian literature, but I found it difficult to keep track of Peter Petrovitch, Porphyrius Petrovitch and Elia Petrovitch (none of whom are related). The fact that some characters are known by as many as three different names or diminutives - I'm looking at you, Eudoxia/Dounia/Dounetchka - doesn't help either.

Once these minor hurdles are negotiated, C&P reveals itself as an intensely harrowing and human account of Raskolnikoff's encroaching insanity, and of the disastrous effects it has on his doting sister and mother. The crime takes place early in the narrative and is foreseen in a way that calls to mind the 'murderee' in Martin Amis' London Fields. The official 'punishment' is more or less an epilogue - Raskolnikoff's restless mind provides more punishment than any Siberian labour camp.

Eventually it emerges that Raskolnikoff isn't being driven mad purely by remorse or fear of capture. The student committed his crime to test an academic hypothesis, to see if he could join Napoleon amid the ranks of the übermenschen, to see if he could reject society's conventions and act purely in his own interests, even to the point of murder. Clearly, Raskolnikoff is not that kind of person, and he becomes increasingly exasperated by his own weakness and the fact that, in trying and failing to be like Napoleon, he has ruined himself.

With a beard like that, who needs happiness?

To me, this was the most interesting aspect of C&P and yet it seemed like an underdeveloped sub-plot. Amid the misery and suffering which Dostoyevsky does so well, I would have liked to see more of this Borgesian idea of taking an intellectual curiosity to its monstrous extreme.

Other plot strands include alcoholic fathers, consumptive widows, misogynistic fiancées, starving children and the ubiquitous tart-with-a-heart, who follows the doomed Raskolnikoff almost literally to the ends of the earth. These threads are drawn together with breathtaking skill, although you might find yourself leafing backwards once in a while to remind yourself who on earth all these people are.

On the plus side Dostoyevsky's dialogue is remarkably accessible to the modern reader, particularly Raskolnikoff's feverish internal ruminations. His emotional turmoil is conveyed without apparent effort and the reader's empathy for the murderer is truly poignant. I've never murdered anyone, but now I know exactly what it feels like.

In short, C&P is a horrifying romp through a Dickensian carnival of human misery. There is, mercifully, a glimmer of redemption at the end of the trans-Siberian tunnel, but this certainly isn't a book for the faint-hearted.

More on Marquez

I still can’t quite make up my mind about One Hundred Years of Solitude. I really enjoyed it to begin with, then went off it, and now I like it again. I think the problem for me is that Marquez’s characters are so fundamentally unlikeable, but his descriptive writing is so good that he achieves an awkward ambivalence, at least for me.

The Buendia family is a parade of grotesques. From the mad Jose Arcadio Buendia, tied gibbering beneath a chestnut tree, to the seemingly immortal Colonel Aureliano Buendia, whose guerrilla campaign is both tragedy and farce. Reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, and even his own attempt at suicide was a failure because his doctor predicted it and gave the colonel false information when he asked precisely where his heart was. These characters appear in the first half of the book. They are roguish and have their own charm; they are romantics, explorers, adventurers.

I am currently in the middle of the book, and the later generations of Buendias do not, for me, have the same charm. Many of them are dominated by their own fleshly pursuits, chasing women old enough to be their mothers, or women who are in fact their half-sisters or aunts. I’m not a prude, but it gives me a little British shudder.

The book is unquestionably visceral, and this comes through in the musty, sweaty sex scenes. It is also manifested in the periodic outbursts of bloody violence, the daughter who eats earth and whitewash from the walls when she is upset, and the suffocating closeness of the village of Macondo, in seeming isolation from the rest of the world. It is a dirty place, and it is testament to Marquez’s evocative style that the characters and their vices are so repellent to the reader.

I find myself willing forward the conviction of the matriarch, Ursula, that one day the family will have a Good Son who will be a priest. But since the previous priest had an unusual fondness for female donkeys, even this idea seems tainted. She begins to be superstitious that the family’s run of ne’er-do-wells is a result of the reuse of names, and she rows with the younger generations over the proposed names of their offspring. This too, is a conviction that the reader shares. Despite the family tree at the beginning of the book, it is virtually impossible to keep track of all the Jose Arcadios, the Aurielianos, the Aureliano Joses, the Amarantas, the Rebecas, the Remidioses.

Eventually – and for me this came only about a third of the way through the book - they coalesce into a repulsive tangle of dirty habits which is not easily resolved. They procreate, and the same names and the same vices become perpetual. This, of course, is the point of the book. It is a catalogue of misfortune that spans so many generations that one all but loses track, lost in the rottenness of the family and the village. We become irrevocably involved.

I’m not a sucker for a happy ending, but I hope there is a priest, and I hope he turns out alright.

Holidays and Hemingway

As it’s holiday season, I have once more been Reading A Novel. This is not something that happens during the normal course of things, since reading a large amount for work purposes tends to discourage reading for pleasure. But it makes a very refreshing change in the holidays.

I am currently about halfway through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a second-hand book I bought for a pittance a while ago on the basis that I would quite like to read it at some point in the not-too-distant future. Unlike most books that I do this with, I am now actually reading it.

If you ask me why I wanted to read that particular book, I would quietly admit that it is partially because there is a song of the same name by Metallica. But it’s more because I’ve read a bit of Donne in my time. And yes, the band named it after the novel, not the ‘no man is an island’ business. (I don’t want to give the impression that I normally base my reading on recommendations by rock bands, its just that it was something I’d heard of and wanted to have a look at. It also falls into the category of ‘classic’ literature, which makes me something of a sucker for it.)

So, thoughts on Hemingway. More or less the only thing I know about the man himself is that he was fond of a drink. This is something that comes through in the novel, but Hemingway certainly isn’t sympathetic towards the untrustworthy, bristly, porcine drunkard Pablo, whose shadow is cast over the plans of the bold American, Robert Jordan. Nonetheless, there’s already been an awful lot of wine, whiskey and absinthe (especially absinthe, inspiration to author and protagonist alike) and I’m only halfway through the book. So, the music I listen to influences my choice of reading, and Ernest’s love of liquor influences his writing. So far, so reprehensible.

Hemingway seems to have a slightly irritating habit, starting about a third of the way in, of wandering off on a series of stream-of-consciousness type monologues. These clearly help to develop our view of the war and the characters’ views on it, but they are less interesting than the dialogue and actions of the characters themselves.

Despite this, I’m really enjoying the book. The high point so far (and this says a lot about me) has been a flashback narration of the execution of some fascists in a small town at the start of the war. The fighting is dealt with laconically; the pathos of the executions is the real focus. There is blood and drink, and the instability of the crowd and its painfully inevitable degeneration from dignified and reluctant executioner to howling mob is riveting. The humanity of the scene is affecting, and the predictability of the clean, ideal revolution spiralling into bloodshed is hypnotic.

At this stage in the book, very little has actually happened. The small-town origins of the revolution were distanced from the action of the plot, and Robert Jordan’s main objective of demolishing a bridge is really just beginning to come to prominence. Much of the first half is about humans and how they behave around other humans, and this, I think, is where Hemingway is at his best. The Shakespeare-lover in me enjoys his pseudo-translated, pseudo-antiquated Spanish with its idioms and its ‘thees’ and ‘thous’. The rest of me, of course, enjoys its carefully-crafted insults and curse-words, ‘in which the acts are never stated but only implied.’ So, for now, I bid thee unprintable thyself and obscenity on thy way.

And incidentally, the title of this blog is also from Hemingway. I just happened to like that part too.