Dostoevsky: How to Read Rowan

Day off, and a chance to open Rowan Williams’ book on Dostoevsky, which arrived yesterday. I’m wondering how to eat this particular elephant. It doesn’t look like an in-flight job. Russian novels can be a tad complicated anyway:

And then, of course, Dostoevsky is stuffed with added complex metaphysics:

Think about it. Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky could take longer to read than it did to write. Well, I hope I don’t have to read the entire works of Dostoevsky to pass go, but it’s been a few years, so I've loaded up the eBook Reader with some (free) prime juicy Dostoevsky. Then it’s down to my patent method for reading Rowan's more “clotted” stuff:

• He’s really a poet, therefore it's densely packed with images. Often the images, in themselves are simple but surprising. That’s half the fun. Like all forms of poetry you have to unpack it yourself. If you only ever do bleeding obvious level sudokus, I can reliably suggest Rowan is not the writer for you. But if you like a good puzzle and learning by discovery, it’s magical stuff. Ideas are often approached by the side entrance, not the front door. It’s usually better to take things a chapter at a time, slow down, switch off the speedreading circuits, and relax. Like a poem, go with the flow and see where it leads. Don’t analyse, or you lose the flow! Read the whole paragraph, then stop and think it through.
  
• The writing often works on more than one level simultaneously. The secret is to latch onto the level that’s caught your attention, follow it through consistently, then review the chapter. If you pick up another angle follow that through in its own terms. If you accidentally mix ’n match the levels, it gets like controlling SuperMario on several levels at once, and you go nuts by the end of the chapter. You are allowed to read the book more than once.
  
• It rarely works to try and read the book at one sitting. Pacing chapters between, say, one morning a month sessions works a treat. I did once read a Rowan book on why history matters on a plane in under 3 hours; but historiography is my thing, and that was a one off achievement I don’t ever expect to emulate again.

Similar things could be said, perhaps, of Dostoevsky. So this is either gong to be a resonant match of deep speaking to deep, or a clotted expressionists Godzilla-meets-the-beast experience. I’ll let you know in, er, about two years time?

Woody Allen: Losing it or Finding it?

Cassandra’s Dream is Woody Allen’s third London movie, and his first with the toffs taken out.

The Blaine Brothers have ambitions, but are no hopers really. For all their borrowed Jaguars and 007 poker runs, one is essentially gormless and the other essentially basic. Whilst improving themselves they both land up in severe financial chokey, necessitating a bailout from rich Uncle Howard. Sadly this costs a spot of help with a job of his own, that carries its own moral and human price tag.

Family is family. Blood is thicker than water. Everybody, by trying to move their lives on and sort things out, ends up in worse chokey than ever. That’s tragedy, folks. This is an outing farther up and farther into classic Woody Allen country — Take the Money and Run, Small Time Crooks, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point.

This film’s engine is Greek Tragedy, with a dash of Dostoevsky. Overwhelming psychological probabilities indicate that Oedipus could have, and you and I would have, married the nice girl next door, not mum. But imagine for a moment he did the terrible thing, and couldn’t help it. What would follow from that? Greek Tragedy isolates one strand of human behaviour, traps it in a deterministic web, then anatomizes, not psychologizes, it. Therefore, people who complain about some psychological flatness about motive and process in this movie are probably wasting their time.

This ain’t no ribtickler. The gawky conflicted Allen character is split and morphed onto two brothers, one gormless and one basic, rather than squirming in front of us as schlemiel. There is a very small amount of expository heavy handedness early on, but after that the script drives things forward as smoothly as Ian’s borrowed Jag. All the actors drew Lucy and me in avidly. As someone who lived in the East End as a kid, I bought the London stuff, though, of course, I could be snooty about it. Tragedy builds itself up inexorably, but the problem is always how to end it. Perhaps this one dissolves into cock-up, but for me the ending was a kind of “1-2-3, you’re back in the room” at the end of a thoroughly convincing stage hypnotist act.

I suspect this one will achieve a higher place in the Canon than most of the critics are willing to give it right now. It’s surely worth a shoofty.