Good heavens, Blue, my experience was so similar to yours (and to your sister Lydia's)!
I too disliked both Hemingway and Faulkner. Frankly, I can't think of any American novelists I really, really liked. I think Americans are much better short story writers than novelists. Take John Cheever, for example. His novels leave me absolutely cold. But his short stories are wonderful. There are even some Hemingway and Faulkner short stories that I like. But their novels? Ugh...Still can't manage them.
I don't think it is the violence. There are more murders in Dostoyevsky, for example, than you remember. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov kills Lizaveta, the pawnbroker's sister, as well as the pawnbroker himself. Another character in the novel, Svidrigailov, confesses to having poisoned his wife. In The Possessed, Shatov is murdered by his fellow "terrorists," and Liza is killed by a mob. In The Possessed. Illegitimate son Smerdyakov murders Old Man Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov.
But in Dostoyevsky, the murders serve to illustrate, or dramatize, the key philosophical point in the novel (which, basically, boils down to "all life is sacred"). In Raskolnikov's case, we see why, and how, his "Superman" fantasy was a snare and a delusion. Old Man Karmazov's case illustrates Dostoyevsky's contention that "if God does not exist, then all is permitted." And so forth.
I never could understand, incidentally, why one was supposed to choose between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. There was a myth out there, according to which liking the one or the other was a test of one's own character. Did you ever read Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox? Dostoyevsky was the hedgehog, Tolstoy the fox.
I liked them equally.
Joan |
