War and Peace

[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).

Comments

[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????