Joan Carreras recommends a "great and fascinating" book by Dostoevsky

BarcelonaAfter lowering the shutter of the gas station Grand Canyon At the beginning of August, and before picking it up again to start the season at La Villarroel (from September 10 to 21), Joan Carreras has a few days of absolute relaxation. This tranquility is what invites him to recommend a book like The idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a novel he had read as a teenager and reread a couple of years ago because he was able to voice over the 25-hour audiobook. "It sounded like a big, complex book to me, and upon revisiting it, I found it fascinating, fantastic, a revealing and very contemporary work," says the actor, who has also performed Russian classics in the theater, such as Ivanov by Chekhov.

Carreras describes the plot as "the journey of a boy full of innocence and worlds to discover that he ends up being swallowed up by a closed and corrupt society." Dostoyevsky wrote The idiot in 1868, after Crime and Punishment and before the culmination The Brothers Karamazov and explored manipulation and self-interest as opposed to absolute goodness, through the naive figure of Prince Mixkin. The Russian writer wrote: "I am an idiot because I am different from them. I see the world with compassion and understanding, and I believe in the goodness of people. But my kindness is mistaken for weakness, and my compassion is seen as foolishness. I am an idiot because I am alone in a world of fools."

Carreras is drawn precisely to this portrait of purity in a corrupt environment, "the idea of the antihero, of the so-called idiot who is anything but, because he simply lives life in a more innocent way than the rest, a group of endogamous, very well-defined characters." "When it comes to reviewing classics, we look for the great classics," he argues. In fact, he himself has another great classic review in hand: this fall he will premiere a text from Temporada Alta in Temporada Alta Alas! Misery will make us happy..