“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.” – Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

On Prestuplenie And Punishment

I’m treating myself to a read of Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT in a Wordsworth Classics edition at the moment, and came across the following at the end of the Introduction:
The Russian word for ‘crime’ in the title of the novel and elsewhere is prestuplenie from pre (across) and stuplenie (a stepping) – i.e. similar to the etymology of the English ‘trans-gression’. This sense of ‘stepping across’ a barrier or a moral code is missing from the word ‘crime’.
  Maybe it’s just me, although I very much doubt it, but I always assumed that the crime in any given crime novel – murder, kidnap, blackmail, etc. – is at least as important in terms of its differentiating the lawful from the unlawful (the ‘awful’?) as it is in kick-starting the story. A crime can be any specific act that is illegal or unlawful; but the act of committing a crime is always an act of transgression.
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