I decided to read War and Peace not for any lofty reasons, but simply because it has come to define literature, at least in the world of clichés. "Well, it's not War and Peace, but. . ." is, after all, a common expression. For example, there's a paint commercial currently running where the parents are busy working and for comic effect a 7-year-old boy and girl are seen reading "War and Peace." No other book would have been funnier. Even at the Harvard library, the woman signing it out to me said, "Some light summer reading for the beach?" (More on that later.) I laughed. That's exactly what I would have said too. In short, "War and Peace" has become a symbol for all long, difficult, and dense literature.
And so I had to read it, and it wasn't nearly as cumbersome as I had expected it. It takes about 100 pages to really get into, and Tolstoy's 100-page epilogue nearly killed me. (It's not often an epilogue is split into parts one and two.) Aside from that, I enjoyed it. There's a strangely liberating feeling when you're reading a book this long. One ceases to worry about finishing the thing. It's so long that I just read it at a meandering pace, because what difference would it make if I rushed?
Now that I have finished it, I find that I miss dipping into this different world every night. The novel in many ways defined my summer, in that it took most of a season to read. I find that I miss all the characters, and there were so many. It's one of these strange books where there doesn't really seem to be a protagonist. I suppose Pierre or Natasha come the closet to being protagonists, but there are long stretches where they are nowhere to be found. And there are even longer stretches where Tolstoy just decides to go off on a rant about something.
As with "Crime and Punishment," there was so much of the book that seemed odd to my Western sensibilities. So many times, the characters did things that completely surprised me, and that doesn't happen much when I read American or English novels. There's also this wonderful Russian notion of fate that runs through the novel: Everything that happens is meant to happen, so screw it.*
Still, is it sacrilege to say that Leo Tolstoy could have used a better editor? Actually, it may just be inevitable that I would think that after reading any 1,215 page novel. About that epilogue, I wish I had just skipped it, because it left a sour taste with me. The last 35 pages (all of Epilogue, Part 2) feature none of the characters. Instead, it's just one long treatise from Tolstoy on history, and how most historians are just idiots. **
I felt a little cheated. Normally, when you're reading a book, you're gearing up for the final page, knowing that it will be the last time you read about the characters. Their words and actions take on added significance. Here, though, I kept expecting Pierre or Natasha or someone to make one final curtain call over the last 35 pages, and I never knew until the end that I had seen the last of them.
And finally, it is true that one cannot read "War and Peace" at the beach. I took it with me one day to the beach to test this theory. The result: A grand total of three pages read over a half hour. And that's a generous estimate, given that the chapter I read started on the bottom of the first page and ended in the middle of the third page.
I find "War and Peace" works best in a dark house late at night with only one light on. I didn't try candlelight, but that would be good too. It does not obviously work at the beach. I felt like screaming at people, "Will you stop with the frivolous beach conversations. And put that Frisbee down. Don't you realize that Moscow is falling? And you in the bikini, I'm trying to concentrate here. Will you stop with the frolicking? Prince Andrei has been injured, and I need to know what will happen to Count Bezukhov!"
Some people just don't get it.
* Slight paraphrase of thematic elements present within Tolstoy's master work.
** Slight paraphrase of thematic elements present within the epilogue of Tolstoy's master work.
Leave a comment