The Finklestein Weekday Evening review

Timmy Finklestein, staff (Kevin Doole)

illustration by ted barker

Last night at bedtime Mummy finished reading me a story called Crime and Punishment. I usually almost always like action stories so Mummy thought this was probably going to be a good book for me, but I think maybe she made a wrong choice. The book was written by an old man who was named Dostoevsky. He is pretty good at writing but he made some big mistakes in his book. His first mistake was about how he used his words. The main thing was that he used too many words to say very little.

In the book, a man named Rodion kills a lady named Alyona to take her money. He also kills Alyona’s younger sister. Rodion thinks that if he uses the money for good then it’s OK to kill Alyona but he wished he didn’t kill Alyona’s little sister. After that, he gets sick and goes kind of crazy for awhile. And then a detective catches him. Mummy says Rodion has an existential battle, which I think just means that he can’t make up his mind about some stuff that’s actually not too hard to figure out.

Dostoevsky wasted a lot of time writing all about Rodion’s dreams and his thoughts and stuff. So I told Mummy what I thought about Dostoevsky’s writing and she said that sometimes adults think more about some things. Well, if that’s true, then adults are kind of silly. Why waste so much thought on thinking about the “sort-of” stuff instead of thinking about the real stuff?

I asked Mummy and she said that the human spirit is dualistic in its formation and has a conflicted representation. She said Dostoevsky is saying some very interesting and amazing things about life. But Rodion never even starts to think about real stuff. He just wants to think about why things happen and how good he is. He thinks all this stuff and does all this other stuff that isn’t what he thinks. Like right at the beginning he gives a drunk man some money even though he really doesn’t want to. It’s stupid because it just shows that all this time he spends thinking about all this silly stuff, he’s not actually thinking about it at all. He’s just play-thinking, really. Like when Joey and me made the table into a submarine with a big blanket and cushions and we were trying to hunt another bad submarine and Joey told me to calculate the depth. I thought about how to do that and I discovered the answer, but I wasn’t really, really thinking. It was just pretend. When Rodion thinks about most of his stuff, you can tell he’s really only pretending because then he does different stuff.

Like, sometimes he talks about being exceptional, like Superman or Batman, and he says that makes it OK for him to kill. But Superman can’t kill because he’s such a good guy. I bet Dostoevsky never even read Superman comics; otherwise he would know that killing is bad.

Actually, Batman can kill people in comic books. But only if they’re really bad. And usually he doesn’t even mean to. Usually he punches the bad guy and then the bad guy gets a bit of rope looped around his foot and trips and then falls backwards into a big pit or into acid. He usually never kills anyone on purpose. Rodion should know that killing people is not good even for superheroes. Everybody knows that.

He says he’s an exceptional man, but you can tell he really doesn’t think so. Mrs. Marvin, my teacher, says that sometimes people talk big because they feel small. That’s how come Superman and Batman are so nice to everyone. Because they know they can beat up anyone so they don’t need to be mean. Rodion maybe feels like he can’t be as good as some other people so he needs to find silly ways to give lots of money to people so that they will think he is good.

I think Dostoevsky needs to learn more about how people think before he writes a new book. So, here are some pointers I would keep in mind:

1. Sometimes less is better!

There’s a lot of words in this book. That’s OK, but most of the words are dumb. You don’t need to think so much, Fyodor!

2. Watch the comma use!

Too many commas can make a sentence lose its meaning and look jumbled. Good grammar is also very important if you want people to take your writing seriously. It’s also really important to sound normal and make your characters talk how people talk in real life. Otherwise people won’t want to read it. Like in The Hardy Boys, the talking is really normal. They talk like I talk and I like that. The characters also do stuff that makes logical sense. Dostoevsky, you could learn a lot from the Hardy Boys, I think!

In conclusion, Crime and Punishment is a good start for Dostoevsky. If he decides to write some more, he should try to be a little more normal and not worry so much about using lots of words and long sentences and fancy language. It’s like Mrs. Marvin says, sometimes people talk big because they feel small. Well, maybe Dostoevsky could learn a thing or two from that.

Maybe you just need a little more confidence and you can write a lot better, Fyodor! Keep it up!