The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky's final novel and his best. The Grand Inquisitor chapter alone generates more debate than most writers' entire careers. Freud called it the greatest novel ever written; he wasn't exaggerating by much.
"Reading Dostoevsky's work is comparable to pushing a piano up a hill." The incline: four hundred pages of throat-clearing before the murder the plot hangs on, monastery interludes, Zosima's complete life story, one paragraph readers have clocked at seven pages. The theology reads to another as "narrated clumsily by an unreliable narrator," essays wedged into the novel rather than scenes the story earned. Alyosha is a pious blank beside his brothers; "so many names and nicknames in this book I got confused" is practically a chorus. Reading logs run most of a year, the final chapter deflates rather than resolves, and a tighter version of these ideas already exists under the title Crime and Punishment.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
