J's Pages

This one's an interesting tale, featuring the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. The setting is 1869 in St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky has arrived from his home in Germany to collect the things of his stepson, Pavel, an apparent suicide. He rents the room that Pavel occupied, wanting to spend some time to mourn and process Pavel's death. He does this, but, in his encounter with the police and the people Pavel knew in his final days, Dostoevsky hears of the possibility that Pavel might have actually been murdered. What follows isn't a mystery, but rather an emotional struggle with the topics of revolution, fatherhood, aging, and lust. The characters are complex and interesting--the type you can hate one minute and sympathize with the next. I appreciated how Mr. Coetzee depicted one's struggles with one's inner demons--how the desire to be good can be quickly followed by desires that are more self-serving. I'm not familiar enough with the real Dostoevsky's work to know how well the story captured his personality or the themes of his books, but the tale was able to stand in its own right.

Check it out.