chickenfeet: (blouses)
[personal profile] chickenfeet
I finished ploughing through War and Peace for, I think, the fourth time on the flight home yesterday. It really is an extremely odd book and one that no publishing company would touch with a twenty verst barge pole today. The story line is interesting enough and I like Tolstoi's take on the the War of 1812. It has the usual problem of novels of the period of having a bunch of rich, mostly silly, people who treat the ret of humanity with cruelty, contempt or condescension but so it goes. What I found really hard to take this time was the endless, tedious rambling about Tolstoi's incredibly weird theory of history. Truly, my eyes glazed over. Still Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky is one of the few characters in fiction I can easily identify with.

(Actually it might be fun to ask who you think I would identify with or who you think I'm like).

Date: 2008-09-24 02:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dyddgu.livejournal.com
You are the second person today to talk to me of W&P, and how many times they've read it, and how good it is...

Date: 2008-09-24 03:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lemur-man.livejournal.com
Those essays abopt greatness and such don't get much easier to take in audiobook format either ...

Date: 2008-09-24 03:38 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com
There's quite a nice BBC radio dramatisation (Simon Russell-Beale as Bezukhov, Leo McKern as Kutuzov) that cuts most of the philosophical meandering out.

Date: 2008-09-24 06:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lemur-man.livejournal.com
Might be worth checking once I'm finished with Middlemarch. Certainly sounds like it'd be shorter than 48 CDs' worth of one guy doing all the voices.

Date: 2008-09-24 06:52 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com
It's about ten hours

Date: 2008-09-24 05:11 pm (UTC)
ext_6322: (Default)
From: [identity profile] kalypso-v.livejournal.com
I thought it was his dad who liked maths?

Date: 2008-09-24 05:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com
That's true but his dad was a pretty miserable old curmudgeon (OK I'll probably be like that one day)

Date: 2008-09-25 08:37 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ninerva.livejournal.com
That pretty much sums up what I thought too. Enjoyed the story, but the philosophical stuff went on a bit, particularly as he seemed to be making the same point over and over again. Still, it is one of those books that I decided I ought to read in my lifetime, so I did. Done now... tick. Four times????

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