Crime and punishment

Such an emptiness. Once you finish a book there is emptiness.

I've just finished crime and punishment. The book is quite long and it`s 551 pages have been my company for quite a while.

I bought it almost five years ago in a huge and dull book shop where you can get lost between corridors and corners packed with books. I suppose I was bored and I decided to enter that place again. My significan other was doing an internship in a small company in Coventry (UK) and I was spending my holidays mostly alone.

The village was sunny and rainy at the same time. I should admit it was greener than any place I have seen before. It was full of parks and detached houses with gardens, even the waste ground was green, wonderful place, but it was full of sourpuss people.

So that book shop became my “trending place” that holidays (no people disturbing, just books).

The first book I bought that summer was “The elegance of the hedgehog”, good book if you like French literature. It made reference to Ana Karenina and I became obsessed about Russian writers.

Hence there I was, with more than five books in my hands (between others Crime and Punishment), trying to give my best smile to the distrusting shop assistant, who had been giving me the cold shoulder every time I show up there, and doing my best effort to convince him that even though he supposed I was an inferior human being with bad intentions, it was out of my mind to steal something neither to plot against the Queen. And this is the story of how I got this book and how it got forgotten and sunk in my bookcase, until now.

There is something I should tell you. Definitively, I can’t read Russian’s names. No way, absolutely impossible. My brain reads them as drawings and each time I see them I just translate each drawing (basically depending on the length and the v, y and K repetitions) to something like: the protagonist, his siblings, his foremost enemy and so on. Take into consideration I’m not going to tell you any name.

At the beginning (almost 400 pages) I loathed it and found it nonsense. The story  was difficult to handle. I don`t want to spoil it but let me tell you the crime is ridiculous, and it seems that the author changed the reason of it while he was writing. In addition, I don't like when authors digress. I prefer them to focus on the main story. And Dostoievski digressed, a lot.

After reading it, I can tell you the story is good. It is a psicologycal book with a complicated plot. The different characters come and go. Some conversations are interesting some others boring. But after all, little by little, it makes you feel the anguish of the main character. I do think it's worth to read once in your life, even though it`s not going to be in the list of my favourites ones.

Let's pick the next one.