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Title: The Double (Dover Thrift Editions) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0486295729 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: April, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4
Rating: 3
Summary: Doublemint twins in Dostoyevsky's world
Comment: Dostoyevsky has always been one to over describe (which is a positive attribute) but, this particular book seemed to be low in that area and lacked. Actually, the (entire) book seemed to be unfinished.
I enjoyed the parts where Golyadkin would do things and then in great fear would leave - the party for instance - or go shopping, as the reader thinks but, it is just another insane gesture on Golyadkin's character.
Golyadkin Senior and Juniour would see people, but these people were either not described or never heard of again. One person was even brought into the plot within the last two pages of text. It can be quite confusing and rather unpleasant; not something I like to see in a literary work.
It almost seems as though this was one of Dostoyevsky's first books. The mystery and intrigue were there but definetly not at his best like in 'The Gambler' or 'Netochka Nezvanova'.
I would put this book forth to someone who has read other Dostoyevsky books and enjoys him but, not to someone who is a first time reader.
Rating: 5
Summary: Hoisted like a Drunken Hammock
Comment: Mr Golyadkin is something of an odd fish. He hires a carriage to take himself to a party he has not been invited to, only to retreat from an attack of nerves before he is even halfway there. Following an abortive trip to his doctor (who doesn't appear to like him very much), he goes shopping. Or at least he attempts to create the impression of shopping (in that he enters several shops, makes a lot of noise and invariably leaves without having made a transaction). You learn one or two things about Golyadkin pretty quickly. He appears to have enemies. Or at least, he refers to his enemies (and thinks about his enemies) quite a lot. There is also a woman somewhere thereabouts in the shadows who may or may not believe that Golyadkin has wronged her.
Way before any double appears on the scene, you understand that (a) Golyadkin is an odd fish and (b) you should not quite trust everything he tells you. There is something more than a little neurotic about Golyadkin, and that sense of unease only increases as you read.
It is like you find yourself in the middle of a crowd (and it is like you have been asleep), and there are people all around. There are so many people that you cannot see beyond them. You do not know where you are. You just know that you are in the midst of people. Next thing, they have their hands on you. There are hands on your arms and hands on your legs and feet. You find yourself hoisted off the ground as the people around you start to swing your body as if they thought you were a hammock. You have no control over anything. They swing you backward and forward, each arc hoisting you just that bity higher. When you think you cannot go any higher, they let you go and you fly, out over the top of the crowd and into the sea. It isn't until you hit the sea that you realise you cannot swim.
That feeling (the tension, the lack of control, the blank incomprehension) sits on your shoulder like an enormous black bird all the time you are reading "The Double."
Golyadkin sneaks into the party he was not invited to, and finds himself rather rudely ejected. Wandering through a stormy night (a storm akin to the fog that opens "Bleak House"), he sees another version of himself and gives chase. The phantom Golyadkin appears again at work the following morning. Only it is not a phantom. It is another man. Just because the man shares his face and his name, just because the man happens to have been born in the same place. There is no need to worry. It is all just coincidence. (You can hear Golyadkin reassuring himself.) Only it seems he does have reason to worry. His job is under threat. People look at him oddly. He does not understand what it going on (and we, as readers, share the puzzle with him: why is everybody behaving so oddly?).
This is an oddly contemporary nightmare, the story of a man lost in the fog of the modern world. Whatever your expectations of this book (or for that matter Dostoyevsky), you will be surprised. Where books like "Crime and Punishment" or "The Brothers Karamazov" share a direct novelistic lineage with the great novels of Dickens, "The Double" is more at home in the company of Kafka or Sartre (specifically "Nausea"). The ground beneath your feet is never sure, the peculiarities you are faced with mount up, the book is like extreme drunkenness.
There may well be a great tradition of doppelganger fiction, but I guarantee you: nothing is quite like this.
Rating: 4
Summary: Hilarious and haunting early Dostoevsky.
Comment: Dostoevsky's second novel comes pretty late in the day of the first European doppelganger/double cycle. it's the usual thing - a complacently respectable civil servant, Mr. Golyadkin, is publicly humiliated. Soon, an exact replica of himself enters his life, receiving undeserved favour from the hero's superiors, while behaving atrociously and getting Golyadkin blamed. Does the second Golyadkin really exist? Does he represent the hero's dark side, the Id lurking in his subconscious, performing the transgressions his bourgeois public persona would dare not? Is it all a nightmare? Is Golyadkin a schizophrenic? Mad? All par for the course.
The novel's subtitle gives a clue to its real worth - 'a poem of St. Petersburg'. Dostoevsky's descriptions of this snow- and wind-lashed city, with its dank, claustrophobic, labyrinthine streets, squelching with mud, its menacing tenements and restaurants, and the bordering restless, gloomy river, are a vivid backdrop to Golyadkin's circular nightmare - the storm scene when he discovers his double is an atmospheric tour de force.
Dostoevsky's style in this novel was apparently modelled on Gogol - certainly it is immediate, intrusive, sarcastic, ironic, bathetic, fast, very funny, yet always unsettling, even poetic. Golyadkin should deserve our sympathy, yet his self-importance, long-windedness and cowardice are rendered comically ridiculous, and from the beginning, with the strange ball, the elliptical narrative and ambiguous point of view, the reader's sympathies and interpretations are constantly shifting.
Written in 1846, before the arrest and spiritual crisis, there is no contrived redemption here, and the novel's resolution is more satisfying than some of the later work's, although the author himself was surely right when he said later that the first half is far superior to the second. Best of all are the public set-pieces that frame Golyadkin's identity crisis.
(I recommend Jessie Coulson's fluid Penguin translation, which, a few infelicities aside, captures something of the book's rapidity and playfulness).
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Title: The Gambler (Dover Thrift Editions) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0486290816 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: June, 1996 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 067973452X Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: September, 1994 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: First Love and the Diary of a Superfluous Man (Dover Thrift Editions) by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0486287750 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol ISBN: 0486270572 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: February, 1992 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: The Idiot (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alan Myers, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0192834118 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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