B E B E R E

Summer Reading?

The mobile reader piqued my interest, not only due to his multitasking skills, but also because he and I (though he didn't know it) shared something: savoring Dostoyevsky in translation in our second language. Someday, I'd love to be able to read his works in the native language, but I've gotten pretty close with French. Since he was upper class (landed) at a point where it was fashionable for the upper classes/nobility to speak French, generally a good portion of his writings were in that language. The translations I've read have had standard text for the translations and italics denoting the french as version originale. I've actually read of people in work camps in Soviet Russia learning French through reading Dostoyevsky and a dictionary. I guess it's possible.

Anyway, bilingual guy was reading The Brothers Karamazov. Not my favorite, but still enough for me to think on on the way home. Might be good summer (re)reading. My memories of it are much less fine, since so many years have gone by and I don't take my copy out to savor a couple times a year like I do Crime et Cha(s)timent. The characters seemed too caricature-y for me in comparison to Raskolnikov. Who knows - perhaps with more maturity under my belt and a survey of his other works for framework, I might catch something I missed before.