I found this fair-condition paperback at the Tyngsboro post office book-swap shelf, and as I'd never read this one I thought I'd give it a shot.

I've been using this as my carrying-around book for the last few weeks - it's small enough to fit in my shoulder-bag, and it lends itself well to being read in short installments, as the prose is rather dense. While I can't say that I loved it (I prefer Tolstoy's work to Dostoyevsky's in most cases), I did enjoy the book - at least after getting through the rather slow beginning, where the sizeable cast of characters was introduced and described. Once the love/hate relationships became more clear, the plot began to move along at a pretty good clip, and by the climax - the commission of the crime - I was quite involved.

I found it rather amusing that the subsequent investigation and trial sounded so contemporary: "CSI: Russia", followed by "Law & Order"! The emotional nature of the main characters became rather exhausting for me by the end of the book; while this was described in some spots as the "true Russian temperament," it seemed almost manic-depressive much of the time, and at least half of the main characters seemed subject to these wild mood swings. Apparently, if a public event did not result in someone having hysterics or falling into a fever it wasn't worth having... I did like some of the characters (though at a distance; very few of them would have been comfortable people to have visiting in one's home), and I enjoyed the spiritual debates, from the long sermon by saintly Father Zossima early on to the very interesting debate between Ivan and the devil near the end. But I was often frustrated at the disappearance of secondary characters who'd piqued my interest; while I don't need all the ends tied up neatly (which is just as well, for this book), I didn't appreciate being tantalized by what promised to be an unusual new storyline only to have it fade away into nothing.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

And back it goes! I plan to leave this on the book-swap shelf in the Tyngsboro post office at about 1. Hope the finder enjoys it!