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Crime and Punishment (Pacemaker Classics (Prebound)) Review

Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment's protagonist, is a divided man (his name literally means "split" in Russian). On the one hand, he is an uber-Mensch, an intelluctual who feels entitled to take life into his own hands without regard for the consequences. On the other, he is a compassionate and caring man, trying to protect his sister Dounia and offering a helping hand to an impoverished drunk. Raskolnikov is always at odds with himself, and the two facets of his character are highlighted through Sonia, the moral prostitute, and Svidrigailov, the despicable intellectual. Usually, crime is the most fascinating aspect of a story. Here, the crime is over with rather quickly. Dostoyevsky's true genius is how he paints the character of Raskolnikov post-crime: a tortured soul wrestling with the concept of guilt and what it means to be redeemed.

Crime and Punishment (Pacemaker Classics (Prebound)) Overview

Translated by Constance Garnett, Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons

Crime and Punishment (Pacemaker Classics (Prebound)) Specifications

Mired in poverty, the student Raskolnikov nevertheless thinks well of himself. Of his pawnbroker he takes a different view, and in deciding to do away with her he sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, is a stunning psychological portrait, a thriller and a profound meditation on guilt and retribution.

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Customer Reviews

Check the Publisher of this book before you buy - Kiwi - Mississauga, Ontario Canada
Crime and Punishment is one great novel. However, we have a bit of misleading marketing going on here. Make sure you're buying the version you think you're buying before you order. "Crime and Punishment" published by General Books LLC is a poor quality scanned in version. If you do the "Look Inside" thing on this book, you'll see the inside of another version of the book, NOT the one you will receive.

To give you a few quotes from the publishers website: "We created your book using OCR software ..... with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos.... After we re-typeset ... your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work .... we usually remove them. .... Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. ..... We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. .....". There's no manual editing whatsover.

You get the general idea. Unfortunately, books published by General Books LLC are named, seemingly intentionally, so that they have reviews associated with much better quality imprints. General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Published (google them on Wikipedia), which is flooding Amazon with poor quality reprints and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with beter quality imprints associated with them.

Seems like it's Caveat Emptor on Amazon these days as Amazon certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything to protect it's customers from this Publisher.

PUBLISHER'S INFLUENCE on LENGTH? - -
I'll be very brief with a fresh idea. First off, the book is a great work of literature and a very good read. I needn't say more in that department as the other 5 star reviews here cover it well.

But my theory is that publishers wanted long novels as being more marketable rather than novellas or short stories. I think that influenced the writing of Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad and others. Although extremely well written, my view is that there is some padding in the story here as there also was to an even greater extent in the Brothers Karamazov.

I would be more in favor of "tight story telling".

PUBLISHER'S INFLUENCE on LENGTH? - -
I'll be very brief with a fresh idea. First off, the book is a great work of literature and a very good read. I needn't say more in that department as the other 5 star reviews here cover it well.

But my theory is that publishers wanted long novels as being more marketable rather than novellas or short stories. I think that influenced the writing of Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad and others. Although extremely well written, my view is that there is some padding in the story here as there also was to an even greater extent in the Brothers Karamazov.

I would be more in favor of "tight story telling".

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Jul 30, 2010 02:35:05

Children's Books

Friday, July 30, 2010