Book #1: War and Peace

The book: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

What is this book about: I hope I won’t offend anyone when I offer this oversimplified explanation of the book: It’s sort of the Russian version of Gone with the Wind, except instead of the Civil War, it’s the War of 1812. And instead of the one main character of Scarlett O’Hara, there are many, many characters, and being Russian, they’re all powerfully aware of the existential crises that rage within them.

Also, as far as I can remember, Margaret Mitchell never interrupted her narrative to go on long diatribes about the nature of history, free will, the power of the individual versus the collective, etc., but Leo Tolstoy does that quite a bit.

Why did I read this book: Perhaps it is preordained that I always read Tolstoy when I move to a new place. Anna Karenina was the book I read on the airplane on that first flight out to Seattle, and I started W&P on my second day in Atlanta. Perhaps I just really like reading about peasants after a big move.

But honestly, that is just a coincidence. I have been waiting for this version of W&P for awhile because it was translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, and thus, blessed by God. Look, I don’t enough about the Russian language to completely understand why this is so, but these two are the best translators in the whole entire world. You should only read something if these people have translated it. I know this because Oprah told me so. It’s kind of weird that out of all the things Oprah has said, this is the thing that stuck with me, but there ya go. I heard they were translating this book three years ago and I have been waiting patiently ever since. So it was time for me to read this book.

What did I think of this book: I really liked the fictional parts of the book. When Tolstoy is dealing with all of his characters and the wacky things they do for love and their sanity and their country, then the book just flies by.

But this is a historical novel, and when Tolstoy is going on and on about the characters who aren’t fictional, and providing detailed analysis of battles and historical figures and whether history can ever capture anything real, well I got a little frustrated. I didn’t read 800 pages of what’s going on in these characters’ lives to be sidetracked by Tolstoy’s thoughts on the faulty science of history.

I mean, even Margaret Mitchell glossed over Gettysburg. She didn’t go into pages and pages of what the Northerners were thinking and what the Southerners were thinking and then acknowledging that we can’t even know what they were thinking because we weren’t there and we shouldn’t trust the people who were there because they’re too busy having personal epiphanies about their country and historians definitely weren’t there so we shouldn’t trust them and there’s really no one to trust but God. Was that last sentence frustrating? Well, that’s like 150 pages of this book. Granted, that’s a small percentage, but some of us wanted to get back to whether the Russian Scarlett O’Hara was going to get married or not.

What was my favorite part of this book: I generally preferred the “peace” to the “war.”

What did I learn from this book: Gosh, I know I was really supposed to learn something from these essays about history that I’ve disparaging in this review. I know there’s a lot to unpack in those thoughts and that I could probably unravel the mystery of life if I’d paid more attention to them. I’m saying I probably didn’t learn all I could have learned from this book.

But what I did learn was that war is hell, death is inevitable, and that love will redeem your soul but you can only hope that it will do so before you die.

What grade do I give this book: It feels too weird to give a grade to a book like War & Peace.

Do you want some good tips for reading this book? Perhaps you’d like to read this book to see what all the fuss is about, but you’re too daunted by the size. Well, here is my tip. Commit to reading just 10 pages a day. That sounds manageable, right? At the longest, then the book takes about 120 days, or 4 months. Some days you will read much more than that, and some days you may not have enough time to read at all. But if you read, on average, about 10 pages a day, then it’s only a four month commitment. Another good tip is to have two bookmarks, one for your place in the book and one for your place in the footnotes, because oh my, are there footnotes. My last good tip was mentioned before, which is to make sure you get the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, because if you’re accepting anything less than you might as well just read a comic book or something. But don’t ask me why that’s true.