josh • read

penguins classic version going in mostly blind, only knowing the book's reputation as something classic and massive, my first two realizations were a) it’s very hard to keep track of all the characters and b) it’s surprisingly readable? Tolstoy has clear characterization and tight chapters. The actual writing isn't bloated or obtuse and it felt more contemporary than I expected. It's a marathon but not a slog. Moments are evocative, crushing, sometimes hilarious. but man, somehow this 1300 page book feels twice that length. He admits this early on but it's not fully supposed to be a 'novel'. it's Tolstoy's rendering of an important moment in the history of Russia (1800-1812) that he spent years studying and researching (the book was written about 40 years later). The narration largely follows characters weaving in and out of historical events, but regularly step outside of fiction as Tolstoy describes historical context (the movement of armies, the philosophy of movement of masses, the fallacy of 'great individuals of history', etc). These gods-eye-view sidequests can last for 60+ pages at a time. The worst offender here is the epilogue (more than 100 dull pages long) which sucks any momentum the reader may have had going into the book's homestretch and replaces it with a 101 philosophy treatise of free will. I would go as far to say anyone reading War and Peace can skip it entirely and not miss a thing. War and Peace manages to be about everything. Love and loss and battle and nature and god and mundanity and nobility and peasantry and duels and economics and It's sweeping and massive but also specific, human scaled, and cares deeply about the experiences of individuals.