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Dostoevsky's Last Night
Controlled and devoured by his addiction to gambling, Jorge enlists the help of Lucia, a beautiful analyst, in a battle of wits for his soul
- GenresFiction
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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109 people want to read
About the author
Cristina Peri Rossi
115 books596 followersUruguayan novelist, poet, and author of short stories.
Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of prominence of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay but was exiled in 1972, and moved to Spain, where she became a citizen in 1975. As of 2005[update] she lives in Barcelona, where she continues to write fiction and works as a journalist. She studied at the University of the Republic.
Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of prominence of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay but was exiled in 1972, and moved to Spain, where she became a citizen in 1975. As of 2005[update] she lives in Barcelona, where she continues to write fiction and works as a journalist. She studied at the University of the Republic.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 24, 2019
A story of a man addicted to gambling. We read his thoughts and also his conversations with his female psychoanalyst so we get a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be an addict and the hows and whys of this addiction. (Kind of like Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano which I think of as the best book I ever read about what it’s like to be an alcoholic.) Of course we all know that gamblers like the feeling of losing as much as of winning, so the unbeatable house odds are tailor-made for addiction.
The main character is relatively well-off as an editor for a fancy magazine, but he spends all his money gambling on bingo and the slots twice a week. He recognizes his addiction and is trying to control it, thus the psychoanalyst. He broke up with his wife three years ago and is kind of in love with his psychoanalyst.
The title of the book comes from Dostoevsky’s 10-year-or-so addiction to gambling, mainly at the casino at Baden-Baden (which the main character at one point specifically travels to). Dostoevsky went into debt, pawned his wife’s jewels, and even wrote The Gambler to help cover debts. There are many references to Dostoevsky’s escapades in the book as well as references to other famous gambling addicts such as Mata Hari.
The main character also does poorly in the female relationship department. It’s almost as if he ‘likes to lose’ in that as well. His most extensive affair in the book results in him being beat up by thugs hired by the woman’s husband.
Some passages I liked:
“If you lose, you play again because you’ve lost and if you win, you play again because you’ve won.”
“There are two kinds of gamblers: those who swear they’ll never gamble again and the next day forget their promise, and those who, after losing, anxiously await the moment they can return. I belong to both classes.”
“The world is full of men with an inflated sense of self-worth and women with a lack of it.”
The book was translated from the Spanish. The author was originally from Uruguay but was exiled under the dictatorship there in 1972. She now lives in Spain. A fairly quick read and a good story. It kept my attention and moved along pretty quickly.
Top photo of the Casino at Baden-Baden from db-service.toubiz.de
Photo of the author from lecturia.org
The main character is relatively well-off as an editor for a fancy magazine, but he spends all his money gambling on bingo and the slots twice a week. He recognizes his addiction and is trying to control it, thus the psychoanalyst. He broke up with his wife three years ago and is kind of in love with his psychoanalyst.
The title of the book comes from Dostoevsky’s 10-year-or-so addiction to gambling, mainly at the casino at Baden-Baden (which the main character at one point specifically travels to). Dostoevsky went into debt, pawned his wife’s jewels, and even wrote The Gambler to help cover debts. There are many references to Dostoevsky’s escapades in the book as well as references to other famous gambling addicts such as Mata Hari.
The main character also does poorly in the female relationship department. It’s almost as if he ‘likes to lose’ in that as well. His most extensive affair in the book results in him being beat up by thugs hired by the woman’s husband.
Some passages I liked:
“If you lose, you play again because you’ve lost and if you win, you play again because you’ve won.”
“There are two kinds of gamblers: those who swear they’ll never gamble again and the next day forget their promise, and those who, after losing, anxiously await the moment they can return. I belong to both classes.”
“The world is full of men with an inflated sense of self-worth and women with a lack of it.”
The book was translated from the Spanish. The author was originally from Uruguay but was exiled under the dictatorship there in 1972. She now lives in Spain. A fairly quick read and a good story. It kept my attention and moved along pretty quickly.
Top photo of the Casino at Baden-Baden from db-service.toubiz.de
Photo of the author from lecturia.org
September 11, 2016
From what I’ve read, Cristina Peri Rossi has one amazing book to her credit, the sort of novel I might even qualify as a masterpiece if I wasn’t as guilty as any other enthusiast of overusing that word. That novel is Ship of Fools, and many of the United States’ most acclaimed authors, Dennis Johnson and Philip Roth and John Updike and so forth, haven’t hit anything close to that height. The form, the language, the plot, the character and the symbolism all achieve the sort of synthesis I associate with great literature. And of course it’s entirely possible that other Peri Rossi books have hit this point to, or at least approach it. After all, much of her work hasn’t been translated into English, and even finding the translated works has involved either a) tremendous serendipity (finding State of Exile in a Chicago bookstore, discovering this and The Museum of Useless Efforts via Michigan’s inter-library loan system) or b) breaking down and ordering The Ship of Fools online. Rossi may be a beloved figure in both her native Uruguay (all over Latin America, if the endorsements she’s received from the likes of Cortazar and Fuentes is anything to go by) and her home-in-exile Spain, but her cult in the States looks pretty small to me. Which is a shame.
If you think I’m stalling here, you’re right. This is because I loved the first two Peri Rossi books I read but felt vaguely dissatisfied with the second two. State of Exile was a book I picked up on impulse, one of those “let’s-give-this-author-I’ve-never-heard-of-a-try” kind of things, and she gets a real and palpable longing across in those poems. Ship of Fools is a book I’ve tried to review but can’t; the strangeness and fullness of it has a way of eluding my description. So far so good, and my problem with The Museum of Useless Efforts was so simple as to make reviewing it almost entirely redundant: some stories worked, some stories didn’t. Most of the stories in that book are quite short, and I often find that collections of super-short stories have that problem, or maybe that characteristic, because it’s really not that big of a problem. You don’t like the one three-page story, you power through it and you’re rewarded with the next one. This book’s a little more complicated, though. Aspects of it are very good, aspects of it don’t so much work out.
The premise is a simple one. Narrator Jorge, who I believe is only identified by name in the jacket flap (I have no memory for names, though), is a gambler and a womanizer. I couldn’t tell you for certain what his favorite Pat Benatar song is, but based on his sparring attitude toward sex, it’s probably “Love is a Battlefield.” But maybe he’s more of a “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” kind of guy, because hoo boy does his psyche take a beating over the course of this novel. His gambling addiction wears him down, builds him back up, and wears him down again. He’s also in analysis, and he falls in love with his analyist, leading me to believe that his favorite Hong Kong crime movie would be Infernal Affairs (or his favorite Scorsese movie would be the Departed) if that wasn’t an anachronism. Rossi is known for her feminist views, so she uses the whole novel to scream at Jorge about the consequences of his womanizing, which become more important to the novel and more damaging to him than his gambling as the book goes on. He wilfully ignores them, though.
Now, it’s great to get the woman’s point of view on the sex-and-gambling thing. Culture has the two inextricably linked together, so for a while it came off as this almost eye-rolling cliché, but Rossi writes it with an awareness of the actual consequences of this highly male point of view. This aspect of the novel is one of the stronger ones in my opinion, although sometimes you do have to separate out Jorge’s point of view from Rossi’s, since Jorge himself says and does some pretty despicable things in this novel. Plus his attitude is all sorts of entitled and self-justifying. No, I don’t start complaining until we get to the psychoanalyst, who as a device seems like such an easy way out. You know what I mean? We learn Jorge gambles for thrills, he womanizes because of his absent father and relationship with his mother, on and on and on, and this stuff does get to be eye-rollingly cliché, because it feels like Rossi’s just running through the standard stuff about how gamblers are supposed to be.
When you get to that point, you need to look at your character from a new angle, you need to extract something new from him. With Ship of Fools, Rossi used a combination of art, sex, economic inequality, power relations, the drive for entertainment, on and on and on to come to a unique and uncanny diagnosis of our society. That’s kind of the thing: big stretches of this novel seem like she’s writing about gamblers she’s heard about, some abstract idea of gambling if you want to think of it like that. Even if she herself doesn’t have experience with compulsive gamblers, it would’ve at least helped if I felt like she knew one, if she had a unique perspective on it.
And yet, sometimes it feels like she does. When she puts Jorge in the casino, the novel’s at its most compelling, and that’s why I’m still giving this a three. The first chapter is a textbook case of what a good first chapter should be like. As the cliché goes, she puts you right in the middle of it, and not just in terms of finding the right details but in terms of – and this is so so important – striking the right tone. Her description of a day at the casino, her juxtaposition of the hardened gamblers against the bourgeois weekenders, is funny enough to qualify as great satire, painting gambling as this strange and ultimately futile thing, but it also gives us readers a sense of the hardened gambler at their most hooked. We get Jorge as someone who knows he’s in a cage, and either can’t find the way out or won’t leave because dammit, he likes it in there. I love that ambiguity, it’s so necessary for creating a great character. Jorge tells you throughout this novel that he feels at his most alive while gambling, but any fool could’ve told you that. A great writer like Rossi not only shows us the life he feels, but applies that life to the rest of the novel. If only she’d kept it there when Jorge wasn’t gambling. Then we’d really have something on our hands.
If you think I’m stalling here, you’re right. This is because I loved the first two Peri Rossi books I read but felt vaguely dissatisfied with the second two. State of Exile was a book I picked up on impulse, one of those “let’s-give-this-author-I’ve-never-heard-of-a-try” kind of things, and she gets a real and palpable longing across in those poems. Ship of Fools is a book I’ve tried to review but can’t; the strangeness and fullness of it has a way of eluding my description. So far so good, and my problem with The Museum of Useless Efforts was so simple as to make reviewing it almost entirely redundant: some stories worked, some stories didn’t. Most of the stories in that book are quite short, and I often find that collections of super-short stories have that problem, or maybe that characteristic, because it’s really not that big of a problem. You don’t like the one three-page story, you power through it and you’re rewarded with the next one. This book’s a little more complicated, though. Aspects of it are very good, aspects of it don’t so much work out.
The premise is a simple one. Narrator Jorge, who I believe is only identified by name in the jacket flap (I have no memory for names, though), is a gambler and a womanizer. I couldn’t tell you for certain what his favorite Pat Benatar song is, but based on his sparring attitude toward sex, it’s probably “Love is a Battlefield.” But maybe he’s more of a “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” kind of guy, because hoo boy does his psyche take a beating over the course of this novel. His gambling addiction wears him down, builds him back up, and wears him down again. He’s also in analysis, and he falls in love with his analyist, leading me to believe that his favorite Hong Kong crime movie would be Infernal Affairs (or his favorite Scorsese movie would be the Departed) if that wasn’t an anachronism. Rossi is known for her feminist views, so she uses the whole novel to scream at Jorge about the consequences of his womanizing, which become more important to the novel and more damaging to him than his gambling as the book goes on. He wilfully ignores them, though.
Now, it’s great to get the woman’s point of view on the sex-and-gambling thing. Culture has the two inextricably linked together, so for a while it came off as this almost eye-rolling cliché, but Rossi writes it with an awareness of the actual consequences of this highly male point of view. This aspect of the novel is one of the stronger ones in my opinion, although sometimes you do have to separate out Jorge’s point of view from Rossi’s, since Jorge himself says and does some pretty despicable things in this novel. Plus his attitude is all sorts of entitled and self-justifying. No, I don’t start complaining until we get to the psychoanalyst, who as a device seems like such an easy way out. You know what I mean? We learn Jorge gambles for thrills, he womanizes because of his absent father and relationship with his mother, on and on and on, and this stuff does get to be eye-rollingly cliché, because it feels like Rossi’s just running through the standard stuff about how gamblers are supposed to be.
When you get to that point, you need to look at your character from a new angle, you need to extract something new from him. With Ship of Fools, Rossi used a combination of art, sex, economic inequality, power relations, the drive for entertainment, on and on and on to come to a unique and uncanny diagnosis of our society. That’s kind of the thing: big stretches of this novel seem like she’s writing about gamblers she’s heard about, some abstract idea of gambling if you want to think of it like that. Even if she herself doesn’t have experience with compulsive gamblers, it would’ve at least helped if I felt like she knew one, if she had a unique perspective on it.
And yet, sometimes it feels like she does. When she puts Jorge in the casino, the novel’s at its most compelling, and that’s why I’m still giving this a three. The first chapter is a textbook case of what a good first chapter should be like. As the cliché goes, she puts you right in the middle of it, and not just in terms of finding the right details but in terms of – and this is so so important – striking the right tone. Her description of a day at the casino, her juxtaposition of the hardened gamblers against the bourgeois weekenders, is funny enough to qualify as great satire, painting gambling as this strange and ultimately futile thing, but it also gives us readers a sense of the hardened gambler at their most hooked. We get Jorge as someone who knows he’s in a cage, and either can’t find the way out or won’t leave because dammit, he likes it in there. I love that ambiguity, it’s so necessary for creating a great character. Jorge tells you throughout this novel that he feels at his most alive while gambling, but any fool could’ve told you that. A great writer like Rossi not only shows us the life he feels, but applies that life to the rest of the novel. If only she’d kept it there when Jorge wasn’t gambling. Then we’d really have something on our hands.
December 16, 2016
I didn't expected too much from this book but I really liked it. Apart from the main character I liked Lucia, the psychoanalist, sexy and misterious. Maybe what's best is that is not only about gambling, there are other things that make it a worth reading.
December 1, 2025
3.25⭐️
no me gustó mucho, pero me mantuvo lo suficientemente interesada como para terminarlo.
el protagonista es un hombre de unos 40 años, ludópata y la trama va de su psicoanálisis y de cómo ¿intenta dejar el juego? no me queda claro si su objetivo es dejar el vicio porque nunca parece querer dejarlo ni sufrir porque lo continúa; más parece intención de la psicoanalista el que deje el juego.
bueno, este pata es un machista, p1p1léptico que solo piensa con su "amiguito"... y, no sé, creo que esperaba otra cosa de un libro de CPR. antes leí "los amores equivocados" y me encantó la pasión que emanaba de ese libro, al punto que este me deja un mal sabor de boca en comparación con aquel...
el protagonista me parece insoportable y me molesta que CPR haya escrito un personaje así... no sé... es como que si puedes escribir personajes mucho más ricos por qué decidir escribir a este... así de pérdida de tinta me parece el personaje... en fin.
no me gustó mucho, pero me mantuvo lo suficientemente interesada como para terminarlo.
el protagonista es un hombre de unos 40 años, ludópata y la trama va de su psicoanálisis y de cómo ¿intenta dejar el juego? no me queda claro si su objetivo es dejar el vicio porque nunca parece querer dejarlo ni sufrir porque lo continúa; más parece intención de la psicoanalista el que deje el juego.
bueno, este pata es un machista, p1p1léptico que solo piensa con su "amiguito"... y, no sé, creo que esperaba otra cosa de un libro de CPR. antes leí "los amores equivocados" y me encantó la pasión que emanaba de ese libro, al punto que este me deja un mal sabor de boca en comparación con aquel...
el protagonista me parece insoportable y me molesta que CPR haya escrito un personaje así... no sé... es como que si puedes escribir personajes mucho más ricos por qué decidir escribir a este... así de pérdida de tinta me parece el personaje... en fin.
February 17, 2025
Una obra fascinante que nos sumerge en los laberintos de la mente del célebre autor ruso en sus momentos finales. Con una prosa elocuente y un tono cínico, Peri explora la lucha interna del protagonista entre la genialidad y la desesperación, entre el brillo de sus ideas y la penumbra de su existencia. A través de una narrativa vívida y provocativa, la autora revela no solo los demonios que atormentaban al escritor, sino también la complejidad de la condición humana. Esta novela es un viaje oscuro y estimulante que invita al lector a reflexionar sobre el placer, el deseo, la transferencia, la locura y el inexorable paso del tiempo. En última instancia, no solo retrata a Dostoievski, sino que, en un guiño mordaz, convierte su vida en un microcosmos de la lucha eterna entre la creación y la autodestrucción.
April 2, 2025
Divertido e íntimo. Sobre el juego, las adicciones, el azar y los deseos. Un espejo en el que se puede encontrar a uno mismo. Si lo leen, les aseguro que lo disfrutarán mucho.
October 8, 2025
This was one of my random finds at a local used book store. I was so happy to finally find a new and interesting looking book by an author I’ve never heard of and she didn’t disappoint! I started reading it on my way home and I was hooked right away. Even though the topic of gambling addiction is a heavy one, she somehow managed to keep it light, and the chapters were short and sweet. The main character was Dostoevsky-esque (obsessive), but her creative style is all her own. While I’m aware it was translated from Spanish to English, I liked her writing style. Based on reviews I read, this isn’t even her best work so I’m looking forward to reading her others as well.
February 18, 2023
Die spanisch-uruguayanische Cervantes Preisträgerin von 2021 erzählt in diesem Roman aus 1992 von einem Spieler, ein Journalist in mittleren Jahren, kinderlos und frauenlos. Sie versteht es, den Sog des süchtig machenden Spieles nachvollziehbar zu machen (hauptsächlich geht es um Bingo bzw. Roulette: Immer wieder kommen Anspielungen auf Dostojewski, seinen Spieler-Roman und seine Spielsucht.
Witzig erschienen mir die Episoden, die die psychoanalytisch inspirierten Therapiesitzung des Ich-Erzählers darstellen, den Versuch des Erzählers, der Therapeutin auch erotisch nahe zu kommen und die kecken Abwehrhaltungen derselben.
WSie überhaupt Spiel und Erotik eine wichtige Verbindung eingehen in diesem Roman. Mehrere Romanzen werden geschildert, Frauen scheinen sich vom spielenden Journalisten gerne umgarnen zu lassen, eine wird allerdings von ihrem reichen Mann so gut bewacht, dass sich Jorge, der Journalist, von den Bodyguards, die der gehörnte Ehemann ansetzt eine ordentliche Abfuhr holt.
Ob Jorge schlussendlich von der Spielsucht tatsächlich befreit ist, bleibt offen.
Als witzige Nebenfuhr dient auch noch der hypochondrische Chefredakteur der Lifestyle-Zeitschrift. Er erinnerte mich ein wenig an den Polizeipräsidenten Heribert Pilch, eine lächerliche Autoritätsperson, die zwar grantelnd auftritt, von den Mitarbeitern und ihrer Zuneigung aber abhängig bleibt.
Ein netter, kurzweiliger Roman, rasch gelesene 200 Seiten zur geistigen Erholung.
Witzig erschienen mir die Episoden, die die psychoanalytisch inspirierten Therapiesitzung des Ich-Erzählers darstellen, den Versuch des Erzählers, der Therapeutin auch erotisch nahe zu kommen und die kecken Abwehrhaltungen derselben.
WSie überhaupt Spiel und Erotik eine wichtige Verbindung eingehen in diesem Roman. Mehrere Romanzen werden geschildert, Frauen scheinen sich vom spielenden Journalisten gerne umgarnen zu lassen, eine wird allerdings von ihrem reichen Mann so gut bewacht, dass sich Jorge, der Journalist, von den Bodyguards, die der gehörnte Ehemann ansetzt eine ordentliche Abfuhr holt.
Ob Jorge schlussendlich von der Spielsucht tatsächlich befreit ist, bleibt offen.
Als witzige Nebenfuhr dient auch noch der hypochondrische Chefredakteur der Lifestyle-Zeitschrift. Er erinnerte mich ein wenig an den Polizeipräsidenten Heribert Pilch, eine lächerliche Autoritätsperson, die zwar grantelnd auftritt, von den Mitarbeitern und ihrer Zuneigung aber abhängig bleibt.
Ein netter, kurzweiliger Roman, rasch gelesene 200 Seiten zur geistigen Erholung.
November 21, 2020
Erotismo y adicción al juego van de la mano en esta novela, el periodista protagonista que busca escaparse del absurdo de lo cotidiano me fascina. Leí y bebí con ansiedad cada capítulo, que tiene frases memorables entorno al fracaso y al desamor, Cristina Peri Rossi es una magnífica escritora que no le tiene miedo a mezclar temas tan aparente dispares como el juego y el psicoanálisis en una misma historia. Esta novela tan breve es fulminante.
August 25, 2023
La prosa de Peri Rossi suele gustarme mucho, no fue la excepción. No estoy seguro de que me haya encantado la anécdota, pero funciona y el seguimiento del personaje que cuenta su historia –un adicto al juego– es bastante entretenido. Hay algunos párrafos muy buenos, sea por su composición o contenido o ambos. Ese juego de la psicoanalista con el protagonista me hizo pensar en que después llegaría The Sopranos a romper moldes en la televisión.
August 23, 2017
A story set in a small town in Spain featuring a man who is addicted to gambling and is trying to work out his problem(s) with a presumably luscious female psychotherapist.
Sub-text is loneliness, anger, and narcissism.
Not bad.
Sub-text is loneliness, anger, and narcissism.
Not bad.
September 8, 2018
No sabía nada del vicio del juego, aún trabajando en un casino. Este libro me ha dado una nueva perspectiva sobre el juego, enganchandome de una manera feroz, hablando del azar (del cual, el protagonista te da una excelente descripción)
November 15, 2025
The book is beautifully written but I didn’t get to connect with the characters and plot. I think it’s just a matter of preferences. Good book but not my cup of tea :)
July 14, 2011
The writing in this book is excellent! Especially since it's translated. The story is simple, but so well written the simplicity doesn't matter. A work of literature that isn't too stuffy or flowery. Word choice, sentence variety, and cadence are great. If you enjoy Russian and German literature, I think you'll like this book.
October 4, 2010
I love the concept of mixing gambling with a psychoanalyst, but if you are not a gambler or dont care for mh you might not enjoy this. Seems like it could have been better, but I am fascinated by Dostoevsky lately. I think I will read the gambler one day.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews