Farewell to War and Peace ! I made a new year’s resolution in the dying candlelight of 2019 to finally read Tolstoy’s behemoth, the quintessential large trophy book of my collection which I’ve been saving for a long prison sentence. I managed to read it in just less than a month (not quite life-without-parole), and for the most part I enjoyed it immensely, despite it soaking up almost all my spare time (hence my absence from this place). The sheer scale of the book was daunting - and there was a moment when I reached 900 pages or so, that I felt like a marathon runner about to hit the plateau, the finish line, an unreachable 700-odd pages away. But having come so far there was nothing left to do but relax my pace, regulate my breathing and drive on. I’m making it sound like some foolish death march, but the joy of War and Peace is in its length - after a couple of hundred pages I had moved quite comfortably, bag and baggage into Tolstoy’s world. A Guardian columnist wrote a piece on the book in 2016 and claimed he read the book in just 10 days, and while I’m not doubting his fitness, it seemed to me that such a sprint could not do justice to the book’s grand sweep and the changes the war brings to the lives of the principle characters.
That’s not to say the book wasn’t maddening at times. My edition of the book, an e-copy of the 2010 Oxford edition (featuring a well-regarded translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude) includes the French dialogue which the characters would slip in and out of mid conversation (as was the custom among the Russian elites of the day it seems), necessitating the tapping of the footnotes to read the translation, and disrupting the pace of the scene. Another point of irritation was the morphing of character names from first names to family names to nicknames, sometimes within the one paragraph - another Russian convention that had to be grappled with. One particular aspect of the book I enjoyed was reading the battle scenes, which surprised me - my eyes generally glaze over the complex details of military maneuvers but Tolstoy writes his war scenes with clear, vivid language, and I felt a tremendous sense of the sound and fury of war.
Much of my reading was accompanied by various ambient music, the more minimalist and unobtrusive the better, which sometimes lent an agreeable Malickesque quality to the book as characters expressed their innermost thoughts, and for the early sections of the book, I was pleased to use Keith Jarrett’s 1987 album, Book of Ways, a double-CD of improvised clavichord recordings, an instrument featured in the book, providing a nice bit of cross-pollination between the book and my record collection. I finished the book at the weekend and went straight into William Mann’s Brando biography, but I can still feel the pull of War and Peace days later, the sense of time and place, but mostly the characters and a profound sense of loss for their passing.
That’s not to say the book wasn’t maddening at times. My edition of the book, an e-copy of the 2010 Oxford edition (featuring a well-regarded translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude) includes the French dialogue which the characters would slip in and out of mid conversation (as was the custom among the Russian elites of the day it seems), necessitating the tapping of the footnotes to read the translation, and disrupting the pace of the scene. Another point of irritation was the morphing of character names from first names to family names to nicknames, sometimes within the one paragraph - another Russian convention that had to be grappled with. One particular aspect of the book I enjoyed was reading the battle scenes, which surprised me - my eyes generally glaze over the complex details of military maneuvers but Tolstoy writes his war scenes with clear, vivid language, and I felt a tremendous sense of the sound and fury of war.
Much of my reading was accompanied by various ambient music, the more minimalist and unobtrusive the better, which sometimes lent an agreeable Malickesque quality to the book as characters expressed their innermost thoughts, and for the early sections of the book, I was pleased to use Keith Jarrett’s 1987 album, Book of Ways, a double-CD of improvised clavichord recordings, an instrument featured in the book, providing a nice bit of cross-pollination between the book and my record collection. I finished the book at the weekend and went straight into William Mann’s Brando biography, but I can still feel the pull of War and Peace days later, the sense of time and place, but mostly the characters and a profound sense of loss for their passing.
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