A man who read the literary classic, 'Crime and Punishment' by Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, says he enjoyed the book, but that, in his humble opinion, it was "a bit wordy", and could, easily, have been 200 pages shorter.
Moys Kenwood, 57, read the tale of the psychological turmoil experienced by Petersburg student, Rodión Románovich Raskolnikov, after he commits a brutal double murder, and was, at times, "gripped" by the writing, but, he said:
"it went on a bit."
Asked to clarify this criticism of one of the foremost literary figures of the modern age, he said:
"Well, I mean, there were countless long, drawn-out and tedious dialogues between characters that, ultimately, had no bearing whatsoever on the story. I'm thinking of the one Marmeladov has with Rodión Románovich Raskolnikov; the ones Rodión Románovich Raskolnikov's mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikov, has with her son; Dmítri Prokófitch Razumihin's endless gushing torrents of conversation with the hero; Arkády Ivánovitch Svidrigailov's account of his now-dead wife, Márfa Petróvna, and her ghost's visits to him, and so on. Pages and pages of talk that comes to nothing, and could easily have been dispensed with."
Getting into Dostoevsky mode, he added:
"Vast tracts of the novel are superfluous. The chapter, for example, in which Arkády Ivánovitch Svidrigailov finally realizes that his obsession with Raskolnikov's sister, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikov, is going to be fruitless, and his subsequent visit to a gloomy hotel, his thoughts and nightmares about the young girl, and his suicide the next morning, by shooting, are, quite frankly, almost irrelevant, inasmuch as they have no bearing at all on Raskolnikov, his feelings, or his subsequent course of action, which is, and always looked likely to be, an admission of his guilt to the police."
He added:
"Yes, the writer is brilliant at building characters, and guiding us through their thoughts and motives for their feelings and actions, the different, often conflicting options open to them, with all the possible consequences of their choices, but, at the end of the day, this book could have been skimmed-down by half, and would still have been a great story, though somewhat less cumbersome."
He concluded by saying:
"Now we know where Kafka got it from!"
