Title: The Gambler  

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Genre: Classics

Publisher: Arcturus Publishing

Format: Paperback

Pages: 176

Rating: 3/5 stars

Synopsis (Goodreads):

Psychologically probing novel concerns the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs and complicated lives of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young gambler; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers and other characters. Bleak picture of the fatal attractions of gambling with wonderful characterization, faithful depiction of gambling life at fashionable German watering holes.

Review:

This book is not one of my favourites by Dostoevsky. I loved Crime and Punishment and the Idiot, but this one just didn’t connect with me as the other two did.

The book follows a young man who is obsessed with two things: his love for Polina and gambling. He is the tutor to a generals family, and becomes entangled in the family drama while also having his own drama with gambling. You can feel the characters struggle, and you feel for him, but I felt like the empathy felt for the character was minimal in the sense that I found him really annoying. He just kept doing silly things (not just gambling) that made me struggle to like him as a character. The other characters too I struggled to make a connection to, and Polina is just a scheming young girl who doesn’t know what she wants out of life. This shorter work of his just felt lacking, but I did enjoy the overall premise of the book and was intrigued throughout the book. A couple plot twists really saved this book (but I can’t say what they are!)

Happy reading!