I'm not surprised this “provocative” biography, blending fiction and non-fiction through imagination, came from the fella who went viral for tearing large books in half “out of love”.
There's this AI story that I often think of - A professor puts googly eyes on a pencil and waved it at his class saying “HI! I'm Tim the pencil! I love helping children with their homework but my favourite is drawing pictures!”
Then, without warning, he snapped the pencil in half.
When half his college students gasped, he said “That's where all this Al hype comes from. We're not good at programming consciousness. But we're great at imagining non-conscious things are people.”
This book reminds me of that—we're great at imagining that Dostoevsky's passionate dramatic life mirrored his novels, and our minds want to resolve the ‘clash of voices' into one (but doesn't that defeat the purpose of the suffering Dostoevsky went through to hold a divided, dissonant chorus in his heart?).
That's likely what makes this book work. I hope I haven't reached this conclusion mostly because I felt like I was being walloped over the head with Dostoevsky's gambling addiction by the end. The approach didn't ultimately hit the mark for me since I'm unsure which other author it would work for. I think I might be shaking my head instead if, say, Fitzgerald's alcoholism or Woolf's bipolar disorder was romanticised like his. Alex Christofi's storytelling was spot-on though, and the footnotes had me laughing out loud, making it an easy entry into a genre I have never enjoyed.
