Thoughts on War and Peace

According to Goodreads I started reading War and Peace back in July 2010. I did give it a good go, but then I put it down and just didn't pick it up again. It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying it, but I just stopped. 

At the beginning of last year I decided I was going to try and read alongside the chapter a day readalong. I didn't join the group or anything like that. I just kind of kept up with the schedule. I was doing well until I started working again and I fell behind when I was about 2/3 of the way through. It sat on my desk, taunting me every day. Finally, I decided I was going to finish it, once and for all. And so I did!

Today I am sharing a number of thoughts about reading War and Peace. Fair warning....some will be deeper than others.

This isn't my first Tolstoy. Years ago I read and loved Anna Karenina when Oprah chose it for her Classics Book Club. I loved reading along with other readers and discussing the experience, even if not everyone loved it. I should have joined the readalong for this book but I chose to read alone. I knew that I could read Tolstoy but it was still daunting and it definitely felt like an achievement when I finished it.

I think the thing that I do enjoy about these books is the humanness of the characters and how relevant that is still today. Yes, Tolstoy goes off on massive tangents, and spends paragraphs talking about the fact that battles were won despite no one doing what they were ordered to do. I particularly thought where he was talking about the fact that we look back and say this one thing or one person was decisive but really there were many people and incidents that contribute to the eventualities was very perceptive. I think we see this evidenced in the fact that we say that WWI was started because of the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand. It was, in effect, the straw that broke the camels back, but in reality tensions had been building for years. Another example is that the American's entered WWII due to Pearl Harbor but there had been many events that led up to that one decisive moment. 

Getting back to the humaness of the characters, we saw characters who undertook big transformations due to their experiences, such as Pierre going from illegitimate son, to rightful heir, to husband, to member of the Masonic Lodge, to outwardly losing everything. And similarly the female characters such as Natasha and Princess Marya experienced love and loss, and were bound by duty but ultimately achieved happiness.

Whilst the title is War and Peace, it could just as easily have been Love and Loss or Power and what ever the opposite of that is. 

Humour isn't the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tolstoy but there was definitely humour in the book, from the inept armies who couldn't follow orders and still triumphed to single lines that just made me smile, like the one late in the book which said about Pierre "Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered."

Would War and Peace qualify as having one of the longest epilogues ever? There are two parts to the epilogue and together they are nearly 100 pages long which seems crazy. One was an epilogue in the more normal use of the word where we found out what happened to the characters after the main part of the story. The other part was more philosophical thoughts about war. 

I read the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of the book because theirs was the version I read of Anna Karenina. It felt quite accessible, and I liked that they kept a lot of the French in the books.

Ultimately, reading a book like War and Peace is a commitment, and I am so glad that I was able to finish it this time. I did close the book with a sense of achievement, but also relief that I had finally got to the end. If you asked me to name Tolstoy books I probably would only be able to name this one and Anna K, but there are others out there, which I might try to read.....one day.

This book counts for the Books in Translation Challenge hosted by Introverted Reader, for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge which I hosted, counts as one of my 20 Books of Winter and was read for the Marathon reader prompt of the Spring Goodreads Challenge.