The Double

I didn't really like this one but it might have been the translation. 

Dostoevsky himself called this book a failure, and he was right. Compared with his other books, this one just lacks a sort of Dostoevsky soul. The language is evidently his, but the plot is not very Dostoevsky-esque. At times, it's hard to understand what is even going on, and when you do understand what is occurring, you don't necessarily know why that is occurring. In any case, I would recommend skipping this one.

Definitivamente no me llevo bien con el ritmo y la forma de escribir de Fyodor. Segundo intento de amigarme con este autor, creo que somos un tanto incompatibles.

Not sure what to say about this one. I forced myself to a little over the halfway mark, then stepped away from it for about half a year. After that it was okay. It's hard to tell if I just started to enjoy it more after being more familiar with Dostoevsky when I picked it up again, or if it just got better. Either way, this novella left me feeling like it could have been half its already short length. Wading through Mr. Goliadkin's thought and speech was my greatest difficulty, even in light of trying to evaluate what Dostoevsky was doing with the story. Really, say, that aspect was, if you please, truly nightmarish, sir or madam. It was difficult, but definitely had a cool interplay of ideas. Self, society, perception, guilt, and I'm sure many more things–I won't pretend to understand it–are explored through our hero, Mr. Goliadkin, and his friend in The Double. If nothing else its strange composition and plot makes the reader think.

This book is awful. The language is unbelievably repetitive and the narrative style is as schizophrenic as the main character. Dostoyevsky calls the protagonist “our hero” 191 times and if that wasn't enough, just about every time he refers to him he also feels it necessary to say “the good Golyadkin, not the bad Golyadkin” or “the old Golyadkin and not the new Golyadkin.” It's so mind numbingly tedious that I could hardly get past it to take in the story.

I've always had a hard time with books that have no sympathetic characters, and this one definitely falls into that category. There's not a single character I could, or wanted to, identify with. It may be that you can write a story from the perspective of a schizophrenic and still have it turn out good, but Dostoyevsky certainly failed to do it here. It is painful for me to trash the book since Dostoyevsky is one of my all-time favorites, but the fact is, this book without such a famous author, would have have long been forgotten.