Guus Bosman

I've wanted to read this book for a long time. In 1998, when I just moved to Amsterdam to go to college my roommates talked often about Dostoevsky. Recently I reviewed a couple of 'top 100 novel' lists, and it invariably scores very high.

I'll keep the review short -- this is an absolutely brilliant novel. There is nothing I can add in this review that hasn't been said many times before by much better reviewers.

What struck me were the huge differences between how the rich lived and how the poor lived; it may give some insight into why the Revolution happened in Russia years later.

Another thing that I found interesting is that many of the discussions in the book are no different as they are being held today. The ideas about serfdom have changed substantially since then, of course. But can moral values and atheism co-exists? What if "God doesn't exists it's just movements in the brain".

"Only how is he going to be good without God? That's the question. I always come back to that. For whom is man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a sniveling idiot can maintain that. I can't understand it."

These philosophical discussions were not the main point of the book -- the story itself is.

This was the first book I read partially on my phone. Wonderful read.