Now you know why it has been so long since my last post: as a palate cleanser following a series of modernist novels, I tackled the loosest of the loose, baggy monsters.
Starting War and Peace is intimidating, proverbially so. It is over 1200 pages long, not counting the inevitable critical apparatus surrounding it, and it deals with historical events unfamiliar to the typical American reader. Making it through the first hundred pages is tough — you're not fully committed yet, you don't know which of the many characters will turn out to be significant, and its largely in French! But fear not, your perseverance will pay off. With War and Peace, you get a strong narrative with characters you care about and an account of the Napoleonic Wars, plus a Schopenhauer-influenced theory of history and character.
Tolstoy's strengths as a writer are his ability to describe an event from a character's (often confused or self-contradictory) point of view and his remarkable way of switching seamlessly between points of view to create a three-dimensional image. The most annoying thing about his writing style is its repetitiveness, at all levels from the sentence to the chapter. I really didn't need to hear one more time about how Napoleon did not and could not determine the outcome of the battles.
Reading War and Peace was nothing like eating my spinach. I truly enjoyed it (after the first 100 pages). I'm also a fan of Anna Karenina, so I'm sure to read more Tolstoy in the future.
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