Evan’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

Tolstoy is pretty great.

I've reached the part of W&P where the Russians have driven out the French (or are about to), but characters are dropping dead left and right. However, at this point, Tolstoy starts to blend his philosophy in pretty heavily, so it's cool to watch him transition from moving around lots of characters to explaining why historians are usually wrong in explaining the Napoleonic wars.

So I'm now 2/3 through the book, and Tolstoy is starting to let his philosophical bent show. We've just had the Battle of Borodino. This translation is really smooth but doesn't destroy the complexity of the narrative or the authorial interpolations.

Just like the a military campaign (I suspect), the middle is a little bit slow.