After 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.

The day all the laws of nature that guide behavior have been discovered, human beings will no longer be responsible for their actions. This is the fear that made a 19th-century classic like Fyodor Dostoevsky –an engineer by training– strongly criticized the rationalization in Notes from Underground (in Catalan, by Angle Editorial, translated by Miquel Cabal). Published in 1864 in Russian, it is a novel about a frustrated and furious civil servant who dedicates himself to plotting impossible revenge and, at the same time, offers a harsh portrait of the challenges of the time and the future prospects of a society in crisis. Among the merits of Dostoevsky's book is a visionary note: the prediction of the algorithms that today decide what we read, what we listen to, or even with whom we should have sexual relations. Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky feared that all human actions would end up being mathematically computed: "Everything will be calculated and established with such precision that there will be no more action and adventure in the world."

Read The idiot (1869) by Dostoevsky as a teenager. The Russian writer writes: "I am an idiot because I am different from them. I look at the world with compassion and understanding, and I believe in the goodness of people. But my goodness is mistaken for weakness, and my compassion is seen as foolishness. I am an idiot because I am alone in a world of fools." Prince Mixkin was indeed different. An orphan, he had suffered from minor epileptic seizures, had looked into the eyes of a man condemned to death, and spoke and loved in unconventional ways.