• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Should I buy it?

Landslide

Well-Known Member
Dostoievski's A Faint Heart is offered tomorow with a newspaper. I've never read any of his books. Is it good? Should I buy it?
 
He is a remarkably good author, wrote a lot of masterpieces, but I've never heard of the book you are thinking of buying. Maybe you should first try some of his better known stuff?
 
It is not a novel but a short story from his early years. It is well worth a buy!!
The characters in the story you will find throughout his writings. It is the 'faint hearted" man who cannot bare his 'role' in life. Everybody likes Shuvkov or Shumkov (cannot remember the name, but it is along those lines), he has success and a good fiancé, but as the title says he is 'faint at heart' and doubts that he worthy of all this. The whole strain of his success and happiness in life makes his existence imbearable.
The story is a good introduction into the works of Dostoevsky if you have not read him. Also if you feel like reading a really good book about him I suggest Michail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevskys poetics.

Off topic I can also recommend Bakhtin himself, not as a writer, but his philosophy/literary theory which also covers Rabelais 'Pantagruel and Gargantua'. In this he analyses the carnival of medieval times, and at the same time indirectly critiques the soviet system, for not revolutionising itself dynamically.

Sorry for the last bit, but I have just read a lot of Bakhtin's works and have grown quite fond of it.

-tZar
 
Thanks for the replies, but I ended up not buying the book, cause I didn't have time to go to the newsstand (it was a complicated and loooooooooong day...). I'll look into Dostoievski's work with more attention though. Thanks once again.
 
Thanks for the replies, but I ended up not buying the book, cause I didn't have time to go to the newsstand (it was a complicated and loooooooooong day...). I'll look into Dostoievski's work with more attention though. Thanks once again.

A shame. You missed a real goody.
 
Back
Top