…įMD’s concern was always what it is to be a human being – i.e., how a person, in the particular social and philosophical circumstances of 19th-century Russia, could be a real human being, a person whose life was informed by love and values and principles, instead of being just a very shrewd species of self-preserving animal.
And by this I don’t mean just that they’re successfully realized and believable and ’round.’ The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them. “The thing about Dostoevsky’s characters is that they live. It gets better: Wallace picks up considerable steam – both on Fyodor Dostoevsky(a.k.a. Wallace’s long, digressive footnotes are a precursor to Junot Diaz’s running, footnoted commentary on the history of the Dominican Republic in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Diaz is compelling Wallace just goes on a bit.
Wallace intersperses his review with italicized, existential questions between asterisks (sample: “What does ‘faith’ mean?” “Is it possible really to love somebody?”), and the determinedly rambling and offhand style began to grate early on. I have to say it was, initially, a bit of a slog. I hadn’t had the chance to read the edgy author before. Here’s the kicker: they were reviewed by David Foster Wallace, the late great writer who killed himself in 2008. She was sorting through mountains of photos and papers of her husband, the late and wonderful Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank.Īmong the pile, she handed me this, from the Village Voice Literary Supplement: a 1996 review of the first four volumes of Joe’s mammoth Dostoevsky biography. I drove over to visit Marguerite Frank at her Stanford apartment one night last week.
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