In Mrs. Snow's sixth grade literature class, I learned the difference between story and plot. "Story," Mrs. Snow said, "is what happens. Plot is why it happens." This distinction seemed vague and pointless to me as we started reading Tolkien's The Hobbit as a class. She told us story is all the information about Middle Earth, Smaug, the Dwarves, Hobbits, and that plot is the mechanism with which we can connect these dots.

Four hundred pages into Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov, Mrs. Snow's definition of plot begins. Before that, we are just given a series of dots, and in the final half, all of those dots are connected. Dostoevsky did not know the difference between plot and story. These distinctions didn't really exist at the point in which he wrote. Instead, Dostoevsky made these distinctions: Philosophy and Literature. For Dostoevsky, philosophy was his occupation, and literature was the medium through which to express it. Unlike Tolstoy, who was a storyteller first and a philosopher second, Dostoevsky started each novel with a series of questions he wanted to try and answer.

The question of this novel, first and foremost, is "If God did not exist, would we have to create one?" Across eight hundred pages, Dostoevsky presents the audience with hundreds of parables, conversations, fights, murders, romances, and eventually a courtroom drama. The pacing is sometimes interminably slow. Conversations can last for dozens of pages. Tangents find tangents. The plot, if we are going to let Mrs. Snow have her fun, is awful. But the story!

At several points reading this novel, I started entire chapters over again just to revel in the ideas presented. The most famous chapter, The Grand Inquisitor, which has been published by itself for over a century, is the idealogical centerpiece of this book, asking questions of religion and humanity which rival any philosophical work I've ever read.

This novel is not for people who get bored easily, as several passages strain even the most patient readers, but the novel is also so full of life and joy and so many ideas that you cannot put it down once you reach a certain point. Each section of the novel brings with it a richer and deeper understanding of the people who embody it. Some of my favorite passages involve the old, dying monk, Zossima, who seems to inhabit all the traits Dostoevsky most valued. His death, very early in the novel, jumpstarts a sequence I found both hilarious and moving. The novel surprises you with its modernity and its irony and its honesty regarding subjects which remain taboo.

I don't know, five stars I guess.