Adele Wiseman on First Reading Dostoevsky

Adele Wiseman on first reading Dostoevsky:

Now I knew what was meant by a great novel. And there was more where it came from, a slow orgy of Dostoevsky, slow because there is something in all that passion, all that intensity, that makes one literally afraid, each book an experience, a quest that takes time to prepare for, with an awareness that the book is waiting as inevitable as the last age that you will reach before death.

From “Memoirs of a Book-Molesting Childhood” (1987).