Matthew's review of War and Peace

War and Peace (Paperback) by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy, Henry Gifford (editor), Aylmer Maude (translator), Louise Maude (translator)

Matthew's review

rating:

status: Read in May, 2008

I sincerely doubt that I will ever read this book again, or ever feel any desire to. I can certainly see how and why it has secured its place as part of the canon, but I did not find the characters and their lives compelling enough to overcome the annoyance I felt with Tolstoy's personal vision of history and life in general.

There were moments when I came to care about what was going on in the book. I sympathized with Prince Andrey's broken heart and Pierre's search for meaning and I was genuinely interested in what choice Nikolay would make in regards to Sonya and Marya... some of the time. Prince Andrey recedes into the background in the latter half of the book, only to reappear briefly so that he can die a sudden, anticlimactic and boring death. Pierre meanders so aimlessly between various ideas and goals that I could only become frustrated with him and Nikolay is at times such a flat lifeless character that I could not care at all about him one way or the other. War an...more I sincerely doubt that I will ever read this book again, or ever feel any desire to. I can certainly see how and why it has secured its place as part of the canon, but I did not find the characters and their lives compelling enough to overcome the annoyance I felt with Tolstoy's personal vision of history and life in general.

There were moments when I came to care about what was going on in the book. I sympathized with Prince Andrey's broken heart and Pierre's search for meaning and I was genuinely interested in what choice Nikolay would make in regards to Sonya and Marya... some of the time. Prince Andrey recedes into the background in the latter half of the book, only to reappear briefly so that he can die a sudden, anticlimactic and boring death. Pierre meanders so aimlessly between various ideas and goals that I could only become frustrated with him and Nikolay is at times such a flat lifeless character that I could not care at all about him one way or the other. War and Peace is so large that no story line ever comes to fruition and instead of being a truly complex epic it seemed to me that it was only the raw material from which several great books could have been made.

Without any genuine interest in the characters I could only hope that War and Peace would be, in some way, intellectually interesting but I found it even more deficient in this regard. Tolstoy does not believe in free will, great men, the usefulness of rational thought, or military science. I know these things because Tolstoy uses these ideas like a cudgel, beating the reader about the head and shoulders. He does not trust in the reader enough to allow them to draw the ideas from the story and so makes numerous digressions to explain the same opinion as he just explained some fifty pages ago, using almost the same words, as often as not. Worse yet, the second epiloge is devoted exclusively to reiterating them one final time, using only the barest semblance of a rational argument, which is hardly surprising since he has already told us time and again that it is impossible to change any ones mind using words, and the only knowledge that matters is that which comes from ones gut and mystical revelation.

In final summation, the only other book that has ever produced such a visceral exhasperation in me is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps, as with Atlas Shrugged, time will change my opinion of War and Peace, but I am not hopeful(less)

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message 1: by Frank (new) - rated it 5 stars

Aug 07, 2008 07:24AM

If you now value more highly Atlas Shrugged - a novel with not one real human character and ideas that are sophomoric - one doubts that your view of War and Peace will improve.

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message 2: by Sasha (new)

Nov 17, 2009 08:47AM

hear, hear! I read the entire book, even the musty epilogues, when I was a kid & hated it. Your review is almost exactly what I thought of the cursed thing. Even factoring in the jerkiness of the English translation, the book is dismal overall....the original flows a bit better but, as you say, failed to grip me.

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Matthew's review of War and Peace

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