War and Peace in Classics Without All the Class

Oct 19, 2014 James rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016-reads, favourites, war-war-war, translated-works, paused, russia-motherland, meganovels

Let's please skip the summaries and background information that usually precede these things and go straight to the point that everyone needs to (re)read this now, nothing else matters.

A line in War and Peace goes, "It's not enough that I know all that's in me, everyone else must know it, too," which is too apt in this case. It won't get near the point where, à la A Clockwork Orange, I strap you to a chair and lock your eyes open with needles in front of a big screen showing fingers turning th Let's please skip the summaries and background information that usually precede these things and go straight to the point that everyone needs to (re)read this now, nothing else matters.

A line in War and Peace goes, "It's not enough that I know all that's in me, everyone else must know it, too," which is too apt in this case. It won't get near the point where, à la A Clockwork Orange, I strap you to a chair and lock your eyes open with needles in front of a big screen showing fingers turning the pages of W&P at a normal reading speed. The question of legality aside, the experience can't be pleasant.

But any hesitation is understandable. With 1,215 pages, the book by its bulk alone is enough to paralyse most with imagined exhaustion. Sure, a lot of us have easily devoured twice that many pages with some fantasy series, but like the camera that adds 10 pounds, the reputation W&P has adds 10 times its page count. It's no small mental block to get past, especially when other, far thinner books, ones you won't accidentally crush your pet hamster to death with when you drop them, appear far more enticing by comparison. Even books of similar heft, due to their relative lack of literary baggage, still seem more attractive. You can see, by looking at my reading progress, that the relationship between Leo Tolstoy and me has resembled the will-they-won't-they kind more than the love-at-first-sight kind. There were bumps along the way. My new year's resolution proved too ambitious for its time and, quietly, got swept under the rug. C'est la vie.

The second attempt, though, so flew by I got whiplash. Expectations were more realistic this time. It helped, too, that school was out for the summer, giving me ample free time to do whatever with, free time that suddenly remembered guilt on my conscience about that book under that rug drove me to channel towards finishing it once and for all, little knowing that this particular book isn't something like a cheap paperback to be finished and forgotten about after the last page, but something amazing and life-changing that sticks with you as it has with me, and it's no hyperbole to say my life now feels both lighter and heavier after having experienced W&P because, as its reviews here and elsewhere mention frequently, you live it more than you read it or, more specifically, you live Pierre's life, along with Natasha's, Andrei's, Nikolai's, Marya's, Napoleon's, Alexander's, Kutuzov's, Sonya's, Petya's, Dolokhov's, Denisov's, Anna Pavlovna's, Nikolenka's, and, most of all, Tolstoy's.

There are no pretences, no smokes and mirrors, about what Tolstoy's agenda is regarding W&P. He comes out clarifying just that in a letter in the appendix and saying that his characters, both real and invented, have been positioned in his book to act in such a way as to be "an illustration of that law of predetermination which… governs history," and the book throughout confirms his view with characters here realizing that things could not be otherwise than as they are and there preferring the happiness of having few options to the anxiety of having more. Within the context of the story, it fits, but outside it, in that second part of the epilogue where Tolstoy drops the narrator's act altogether and grabs a bullhorn, his proselytisation is no easy reading after the umpteenth hit of the hammer on the same, exact point he's made more digestible in the past 1,200 pages, the point that there is no freedom, that "reason and will are only secretions of the brain." It may have been the outrageousness of his claim, which I can't deny can be persuasive in its simple expression and almost Spockian logic, that held my vaguely offended interest.

But as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino can be forgiven for the latest schlock in their filmographies because of their earlier contributions, so too can Tolstoy be given the same pass because of the grand and sprawling story that precedes the pseudo-ending. Moments are aplenty when the courage of the Russian few, or the insanity of Tushin's here and Andrei's there, in their fight against the French many inspires you into hoping you yourself would one day happily die for Russia, your non-Russianness notwithstanding; and moments when you, discovering your inner romantic, find yourself as in love as Pierre is when she, "like a rusty door opening—smiled, and from that open door there suddenly breathed and poured out upon Pierre that long-forgotten happiness of which, especially now, he was not even thinking." In an introductory unit on film studies last semester, one of the guest lecturers spoke of a concept of the camera-stylo, or literally "camera-pen," that is significant in the field, especially in the sub-field of auteurism where the term is figuratively useful, but here, in such extracts from W&P that are capturing perfect snapshots of life, Tolstoy does more than any auteur ever can to epitomize the literal sense of the camera-stylo. Even through the haze of translation, which Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky do fantastically, the man can obviously write.

My favourite habit of Tolstoy's in the book is how the perspective constantly shifts, not only from character to character, but also in scale where the focus would now expand, now shrink, all without breaking my immersion. Both perspectives, somehow, are equally exciting. From the one that's as if from a god's, seeing all and understanding all, that's where the history lessons start and, as an absolute sucker for the subject, the in's and out's about that time period made me starry-eyed to learn. It's also where Tolstoy, for whose exasperation Napoleon's deification seems no small cause, almost gleefully leaps at the chance to de-mythologize him, tearing away the curtains to expose the wizard.

From the other, more personal perspective that zooms in on the characters, depositing us in Pierre's head, then Natasha's, then Andrei's, plus still others', and repeat, it's hard to feel small and insignificant, even after emerging from the first, omniscient perspective, when their lives are so rich with variety and humanity. There are classic books that people read and toss aside, their obligation fulfilled and bragging rights secured, classic books that they probably won't return to soon if ever. For anyone who finishes W&P, though, they will find themselves hard-pressed to stay away from it for long. While there are Pierre-, Natasha-, and Andrei-shaped holes in this cold, melting heart now, it's more Tolstoy's genius at developing well-rounded and relatable characters that it yearns to experience again, hence my decision to dive right into Anna Karenina, the fact that school reopens for me next week be damned. ...more

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