Book Review: Crime and Punishment

A few words on how the book made me feel

This read is not like anything else. The amount of rawness it carries is fantastic. The writer puts you in the frontline and makes you experience the aftermath of sin. We aren't just a reader. We are Rodion Raskolnikov. It is pure and real. The misery of a troubled man. His ideas, his thoughts, and his intentions feel like ours. Not even once does it feel as if we're in relief. There is always something happening, always something going on.

The characters are intriguing and troubled too. Every character has something to offer to this story of misery. The conversation these characters have are just extraordinary. They are not sugarcoated for the sense of entertainment but are presented as a form of reality that makes readers draw sweat. If i have to somehow minimize the gap then I'd say this book felt like the series "breaking bad" in the sense of its truth-speaking and rawness. It is very real and not glamorous. Murder and crime aren't cool like they show in the entertainment industry. Sin is troublesome. A murderer is never once freed from their mental cage. The physical jail comes later but initially one finds themselves in the psychological jail. The jail of fear, the jail of misery, and the jail of melancholy. That is presented beautifully in the book.

Apart from that, regularly I found myself getting lost while reading. The characters are plenty and their actions are somehow connecting to the main plot. But I want to take nothing away from it, it is just one of a kind read. It made me realize how poverty and mental illness can make a normal person into something beyond our imagination.

This quote from the book hits deep,

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."