So last night I powered through Epilogue Chapter II and am done War and Peace. I failed the Classics Club Challenge of finishing by October 1st. But I finished and it was 1356 pages in ten point font, so maybe taking a long time because I spent lots of time playing Plants Vs Zombies 2 and reading other books, most not very interesting, is acceptable.
Now the meat: what did I think of War and Peace?
Have you ever seen those colour bars where it starts of white on one side and ends up black on the other and gradually shades to grey in between? Here’s a picture of what I mean:
So War and Peace has two threads – the story and Tolstoi’s philosophy about history, free-will, great men, etc., which I will call Tolstoi spew. And we start off in white – all story, but it gets greyer and greyer as more of Tolstoi spew gets mixed in, until you get to Epilogue Chapter II, which is all Tolstoi spew and that I read while recovering from a sinus cold so I’m not one hundred percent sure I really understood the last forty pages in the way they are meant to be understood, but I will summarize as best I can, which is History is not all the reasons why and wherefore about great men. History is the entirety of everything that came before and everyone involved and no one and no thing can be ignored or left out. In other words, history is unknowable due to its massiveness. Maybe a philosopher can come along and tell me whether my assessment is correct or not. Doesn’t matter I am done. Epilogue Chapter II will not be revisited.
Now, I had fair warning about Tolstoi spew. Geoff told me You’ll probably be fine until nearer to the end. I’ve read Anna Karenina, which also has it’s fair share of Tolstoi spew, although I remember that there Levin’s speeches about emancipation of the peasants and women’s rights were more woven in throughout the text, not dumped heavily nearer and nearer the end, but I did read Anna Karenina over ten years ago, so I may be mis-remembering. But, as with Anna Karenina, I wanted to spend more time with the characters of War and Peace. As with finishing any massive book, I am sad that I am done. I am sad that there is no more of Nikolay and Marya and Sonya and Natasha et al. I carried that heavy book around for three months. Now I have to find something else to do while waiting for Tesfa’s art classes to finish and something else to search for on wikipedia when I don’t understand the historical references.
As for content: we’re going along swimmingly, then the book just ends. Everyone who is still alive pairs off, rather unhappily it seems, although since all happy families are alike, the friction and angst and malaise of the remaining couples makes sense in a Tolstoied universe. The last, non Tolstoi spew, scene is someone vowing to make his father proud of him, and then fade to black. It’s unsatisfying. If I go to, as I always do when comparing very long books, to Infinite Jest, another book which just ends, there’s a much more satisfying ending there because it ends a cycle of the novel or a spiral of the novel; whatever one wishes to call it, it ends something concrete and contained. War and Peace just stops and switches to Tolstoi spew and then I get annoyed because I invested a lot of time and energy and emotion into knowing these people and they are simply abandoned to make some point about the wide, infiniteness of history. That is unfair.
Some other notes:
The version I have has the peasants all speaking in, what I assume is meant to be, cockney accents, dropping aitches and ending letters with lots of apostrophes to denote the missing letters. Is this true for all English versions? Denisov as well, his lisp is written out phonetically (w‘s rather than r‘s). Sometimes this was wearisome.
In the Russian version, when the characters speak French, do they actually switch from the Cyrillic Russian to the Latin French alphabet and then speak in French since Tolstoi might have assumed that most of the literati reading his book would speak passable French? Probably it just says as it does in my English version They said in French but says whatever they said in French in Russian.
The short sections within each chapter (two or three pages) was quite useful for a long novel. I could quickly pick the book up and read a tiny bit, while doing other things. That’s a plus for a long, detailed novel.
In conclusion:
It’s good I read War and Peace. I get so caught up in contemporary fiction and contemporary tropes and contemporary situations, it helps put me in a differing headspace to read something so secure and antiquarian. It reminds me to focus. War and Peace is not a novel, even though I mentioned its short sections for easy stop-starting, meant to be read while unfocused. People used to read I think while flipping over the next of my tissue-paper thin pages. Really read difficult, time-consuming novels. And I get distracted after ten minutes and think Oh, I should check my e-mail even though I get, on average, -4 emails a day.
So, it’s like your high school English teacher told you: Reading the classics will make you a better person.
Addendum:
Geoff and I were standing at our unorganised bookshelf yesterday trying to find a specific book (Rebecca). We have, on our shelf, Finnegan’s Wake. Geoff has read about five pages. I have read one paragraph.
Geoff: Here’s what you should read next.
He hands me Finnegan’s Wake.
Geoff: You’ll stop complaining about the random Tolstoi interjections after this.
Me: Do you really want me to read this? I won’t even bother trying to understand it. I’ll read ten pages a day and let the words wash over me the way I do when I read Proust. Then I’ll lord it over your head for the rest of your life that I read all of Finnegan’s Wake and you didn’t. Are you sure that’s what you want?
Also, I have much more Proust to get through before Geoff dies.