war and peace

i did it. i read 'war and peace'. my cunning plan of reading the 'books' of war and peace interspersed with other books (to keep up my interest) paid off, and about nine months after starting, i finished.

my pleasant surprise was that war and peace is actually a cracking good book. it is such a vast and masterful work of art - combining the society intrigues of victorian novels (by austen and hardy etc) with gritty narratives about napoleonic warfare.

to quote tolstoy (from an article that he published about the novel), "I have spent five years of uninterrupted and exceptionally strenuous labour under the best conditions of life [on this work]." tolstoy doesn't hold back, and he achieves a work of grandeur that succeeds in holding the reader's attention through action and character studies.

my tactic of reading other books in between probably helped, but i actually found that i was pleased to get back to war and peace.

for tolstoy the reason for writing such a book was not mainly to entertain his readers. he had a theory about history that he was evidently very committed to demonstrating.

tolstoy says that war and peace "is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle" [although it quite clearly contains elements of all these]. "War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it was expressed."

the concept that tolstoy wants to communicate is this:

"The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two ... but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events... Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event, physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor in the other, but in the union of the two." (from the epilogue)

this is why war and peace has a cast of over 500 characters. each of them has a role to play in history, actions have ramifications. but at the same time the characters are also swept along by the events of history - participants and victims, as it were.

the only time when the narrative really slows in the book is at the end when tolstoy puts together all his thoughts about history in essay form, just in case the reader has missed the point. this break from narrative is a bit of an anticlimax but i suppose it is necessary given tolstoy's primary aims for the book. this ending shouldn't stand in the way of you reading it if you're not a history student - it comes at the very end as an epilogue, so doesn't interfere with the narrative.

all up, brilliant. highly recommended.

read more about 'war and peace' on wikipedia.

warandpeace-o-meter: finished!

the crime of olga arbyelina

the crime of olga arbyelina, by andrei makine

the local library has a few andrei makine books. it was 'the earth and sky of jacques dorme' that first introduced me to makine and i fell in love with his writing style. 'the crime of olga arbyelina' was my second outing with his work.

it all starts off with a fascinating scene that unfolds in a russian cemetery in paris. an old man tends the graves and tells stories of the people who inhabit them. visitors come to the cemetery to hear these stories, furtively listening to the old man's words and fleeing when he notices them listening. and so, he tells the story of olga arbyelina.

the first scene is of olga sitting on a riverbank in a small town near paris next to the corpse of a middle-aged man. the suspicion of course falls on olga as the murderer - evidently this is the 'crime' that the title talks about. however, the narrative then flicks back about two years, and through suggestions and finally out and out revelation, we find out what olga's hidden crime really is. incest. (yikes!) sorry if i've ruined the story for you, but that all but ruined the story for me.

makine once again shows his genius for poetic writing, but at the point of the revelation, the story becomes a dark irredeemable tragedy that ends in olga's madness and leaves the reader feeling somehow sullied by the reading experience. olga's haemophiliac adolescent son (the other party in the said 'crime') is an unlikeable ghost-like figure who drugs his mother. so it becomes pretty hard going, although makine never writes about his subject in stark and brutal terms, no matter what his characters' crimes may be. perhaps this makes it more disturbing in a way. by being captured by his gentle poetry you feel somehow implicated in the story. you keep reading, hoping for that chink of light that might reveal some hope. none comes.

even though i love makine's poetic language, in this book it sometimes feels like this language is just filling space. a couple of times, i found myself thinking that the whole novel could have been quite an effective short story.

all up, do i regret reading this book? probably. 'the earth and sky' was so much more skillfully done in terms of narrative, structure and language. and because of that i haven't given up on makine.

warandpeace-o-meter: 876/981 (volIII, bookXV, chapVII)