The conspiracy completely fell apart, and I guess that’s the message: the weakness of man and the inevitability of failure in such revolutionary endeavors. I think tomorrow I’ll start that food book that Heather recommended.

I’m probably behind most of the group at this point, so I’m going to go ahead and talk in particulars instead of generalities. So, if you don’t want to know what’s happened, you know, here there be spoylers.

I’m at the start of the penultimate chapter. There have been several murders recently, but Shatov’s is the one that really matters; that was the one that was to bring the fivesome together. A couple of minor details bothered me through the otherwise engaging sequence of that murder. First, the fivesome itself. I don’t know if that number has some historical or numerological significance—Internet says that five represents grace and redemption in the Bible, most notably in Exodus—but it’s not the number itself that bothers me; I have a hard time keeping track of who exactly compose the five. The annoying part is that I don’t think the actual five even matter; every character in this book, outside of brief bursts of passion, lacks dimension, and most of the characters that have been attending the revolutionary meetings might as well all be the same. Inclusion or exclusion in this inner circle would only serve to create symbols of loyalty or favor for a particular sort of thinking or whatever rather than reveal any more about Pyotr Stepanovich. In fact, I think that the Shigalyov’s rejection of the murder was meant to be a message along these lines: he advocated idealism taken to a bloody extreme yet would not condone the killing of someone that wouldn’t survive his revolution—a Slavophil and, though Shatov was supposed to be a student, someone seemingly not extremely bright—perhaps because the overt reason for the killing was the survival of the group rather than the betterment of society. The fivesome hasn’t really done anything for society other than print some pamphlets, and all of the revolutionary talk they’ve had had been a sea of nonsense and empty words, the satire of the revolutionary groups.

I guess one of the things of that bothered me initially is that synopses say that this book is satire, and from that I expected the book to be funny. I won’t try to discuss the nature of humor or whether it really was funny in 19th century Russia, but the bulk of the book is more of a morality play than a joke. It’s satire in that it creates caricatures of the Russians, both the aristocracy and the revolutionaries, and especially their overlap, and Dostoevsky’s opinions and lessons are presented by emphasizing absurdities. The annoying part of this technique is that the chief absurdity of the aristocracy is that they’re really boring, and, particularly since the narrator is himself part of the idle rich, it’s difficult to identify with the writing, making it very boring to read.

Anyhow, the best I can tell is that the fivesome is (or was) Lyamshin, Liputin, Tolkachenko, Virginsky and Shigalyov. Pyotr Stepanovich doesn’t count, as far as I can tell, since he’s the head of this bizarre organism, and I think I one point Erkel was explicitly excluded from the fivesome, though now he appears to be the new head. Other than Shigalyov, the five characters are basically interchangeable, and I find it kind of weird that I have so little to say about any of them yet managed to spell all of their names correctly without looking them up.

The second thing that bothered me was that the narrator keeps referring to the group as “our people.” This creates an annoying break in the narrative in that it reminds me that the narrator, who isn’t involved in the revolutionary groups at all and has been absent for the last couple of chapters, is a character in this story however impossibly; and the emphasis on “our” tries to pull me in along with him. It’s probably the second effect that Dostoevsky was aiming for—your crazy thinking will be your doom and all that—but it’s a fairly unsubtle way to drive in his point, and it just exacerbates the narrator problem.

On the bright side, even though the narrator manages to wedge himself in to even the scenes where he’s absent, it’s been pretty interesting the last few chapters, and it’s almost over.

With the new variations in this second part, I’ve figured out some of the aspects of the book that I don’t enjoy. Pretty much every passage that was fun to read was one where the narrator was not involved. This book is effectively written from the view of an omniscent third party, so it seems like the book would be better if Fyodor Michaelovich wasn’t pretending that his all-seeing eye is also a character. Watching Pyotor Stepanovich and Nikolai Vsevolodovich, both nearly insane but in different ways, can be fascinating, but that G?v joker could take the fun out of a circus on the moon. I like it when the narrator disappears; the story becomes at those points more about the characters and less about tediously overt reactions to the characters.

The book is also fun when people go totally off their rockers, but, like Krusty taught us, it’s only funny if the sap’s got dignity. Anything that Stepan Trofimovich does is annoying and dull. Nikolai Vsevolodovich’s confession was interesting, and Pyotor Stepanovich’s breakdown after the meeting was riveting. Even the governor’s breakdown was fun to read, but then Mr. Narrator came back in and drug the whole rest of that last chapter back into dullsville. Yulia Mikhailovna’s entourage seems like it could be interesting—it’s a bunch of spoiled rich youth on the path to anarchy—but the narrator seems to view them as little more than spoiled youth.

No one’s died yet, and only a couple of the chapters in this section seemed to be moving the plot towards that eventual climax. Most of my curiosity at this point about Part Three is what’s going to happen to eat up all of those pages. I hope it’s not all taken up by that stupid fête.

This book seems most interesting when people stop talking and start doing things, but that doesn’t happen very often, and the things they do either don’t amount to anything, like the duel, or don’t seem to have any meaning at all, like the visit to Semyon Yakovlevich. Sure, I guess each has each has meaning—the duel established some character, and the visit to the holy fool introduced the idea of inspired religious madness than be seen and contrasted in other characters—but as events they were meaningless. The plot itself is spread thinly across an expanse of endless paper blackened with empty words. I think I have a new metaphor for how Vegemite is supposed to be spread.

People have finally started talking about the murder, mostly in terms of the use of a murder with purely political motives. An angry mob is starting to form, though it’s not yet clear where their anger is going to be directed. I suppose I could just read the foreword to gain that bit of perspective, but I don’t care that much. The malice resonating within the group of conspirators seems to be pointing to that small handful of characters I sort of like, the sons of the annoying couple from the beginning and Shatov, the serf turned pamphleteer. I like those characters above any of the others since they seem the only ones able to look at this ridiculous mess with apathy.

My thoughts on the book so far basically mirror Chris’s, so I won’t repeat all of that. Instead I’ve been trying to figure out why I find this book so dull. I enjoy a lot of Victorian literature; I even took a class in it and I don’t think I had to, French took care of most of my humanities credits. Victorian novels share a lot of the same features—idle rich sitting around getting offended and catching the vapors or whatever—but at least stuff happens once in a while in them. A vampire will come crashing in or someone undergoes some emotional development or at least someone will have the courtesy to die and give everyone else something to legitimately lament. Nothing at all has happened in these two chapters. The characters are boring and unlikeable and nothing is happening. It’s like I’m reading one of those awful soap opera comic strips out of a 150 year old newspaper. Demons wasn’t the title used in the original translation of this book, and I’m starting to think it was really called Apartment 3-?.

The dust jacket tells me there will be a murder, there will be something involving revolutionaries. I hope things start going in that direction soon. I’m still only two chapters in, so I’m still hoping that I’m in the middle of a very long-winded setup.

I am on page 40/773. I’m reading a hardcover edition—Borders happened to have a copy for four or five bucks more than the paperback, and it comes with a little red ribbon bookmark, so hey, why not—of the translation made by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which seems to be the authoritative version. The first seven pages were consumed by the title and section title and a short poem and a Bible verse, and the last nineteen pages are notes explaining details of allusions and historical figures and things like that. I’m at the end of the first chapter, which, despite its name, was basically a big introduction, establishing the characters and probably how the group of liberal-minded misfits was established. I don’t actually know where it’s going with this; I didn’t bother reading the introduction.

Dostoevsky’s style reminds me a lot of Victorian literature: it rambles a lot and you have to wade through that flood of words carefully in case it ends up saying something. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, just that it’s slow and indirect. “Slow” may not be the best word, either, since that one chapter covered most of Stepan’s life. It paused and examined a handful of moments, themselves spread across a great amount of time, in careful detail and then jumped to the next thought. Based on the title, “Instead of an Introduction,” I suspect that this style is unique to the chapter.

I’m not really sure what to make yet of Demons. I feel a bit overwhelmed by everything presented so far, and yet nothing’s really happened yet. I now know a little bit about the character and history of, presumably, the main players, and through some of the narrator’s asides I’m starting to get a sense of Dostoevsky’s own disdain for this revolutionary liberalism. I suspect it’s more complicated than that, though, since Dostoevsky himself was involved in some revolutionary groups. This first chapter wasn’t very satisfying, but I expect a shift, in pace if nothing else, as I continue, so I’ll just see how it goes from here.

One thing that makes me uneasy is that it wasn’t written in English. I don’t have anything particular against foreign people, but reading books outside of my own language makes me fear that I’m going to miss some subtleties of the original. I’m going to be at the mercy of the translator. I don’t think I’ll be able to learn Russian in three days, so oh well.

I’ve decided to read Sisters, Lynne Cheney’s lesbian Western romance that I paid three digits for a while back in a moment of poor judgment. I bought it mostly for the hey-look-at-the-goofy-thing-I-have aspect, but maybe I can get a buck or two worth of entertainment out of it, too. I read the first chapter, and it looks like it’ll be as bad as I could have ever hoped. Even the typesetting is awful, as if some of the letters just don’t have the energy to hang onto their given line. Attacking the cheap printing is really kind of ad hominem, though, and the writing itself is not short on failings. It reads like bad slash fiction, full of inflated descriptions of nonsense and words that should never appear in serious works. I’m pretty sure that there has never been a “settee” in anything worthwhile. I know from the Internet that it isn’t going to be as titillating as I might hope, but it’s still delightfully bad. It even gives me a little hope in that it apparently doesn’t take a whole lot in terms of quality to be published. I just hope I don’t have to marry a rich Wyoming politician.

I have finished.

I read a short chapter over lunch today at Al Capri, where the ziti special was delicious. I had to read most of it while trying to ignore “Slow Ride” playing on the radio, but I only had six pages or so to get through, and a trip to the bike shop earlier had already conditioned me against the wiles of classic rock. They seem to like Pink Floyd and Rush a lot at the bike shop. “Freewill” was playing when I left. When I got home tonight, I found that my usual Tuesday-night medical drama pulp had been preempted by some sort of American Idol–esque reality show junk, so, my head full of chicken and disappointment, I returned again to the sea of words. I’m on page 627, the end of section 3. Bring it, Pynchon.