I'm not sure when exactly I heard of War and Peace, I think probably in cartoons of yesteryear when they made jokes about big books or something. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who had read it and no one has ever told me to read it because it is a good read. In fact, up until this past July I didn't even know what it was about, aside from what the title implies. Now that I am back into my old reading habit again I decided I finally needed to give this one a go, as a sort of life goal check mark thing.
It should be noted when I set out to read this book I needed to get a hardcover version. This was because since I've outgrown my plastic trophies from high school I need something to display as an accomplishment, and War and Peace has proven to be just that. My arms are probably measurably stronger since reading it especially because it is a physically (and mentally) heavy book. At no point in the 1215 pages did I read it lying supine with the book in the air. I haven't weighed it but I would guess it would weigh in somewhere near 10 pounds, no joke.
So for whatever reason I decided to read Tolstoy's epic. Right away I needed to figure out why its called an epic, which pretty much means that he took a long ass time (five years) and effort (historically accurate) into writing this book. I learned about halfway into reading it that the book has more characters than any other novel, which I believe. Since nearly all of those characters are Russians or French it took me about 300 pages to figure out which character belongs to which storyline. Eventually that didn't matter since they were all tied together by the end.
Since I think everyone has heard of War and Peace and few have read it I naturally assumed this book was profound and profoundly difficult to read. I thought it was going to be a twelve hundred + page test of patience, but it turns out the story isn't bad at all. In fact at times it gets very engaging and exciting. But mostly it is long. Many people will argue but I think it really only boiled down to 5 different main characters: Price Andrei the man who found out what is beautiful and necessary in life; Fat Pierre Bezukhov, who absentmindedly pondered the meaning of his existence; Natasha Rostov, A beautiful woman who embraces life and love to the fullest; Her Brother Nikolai Rostov, who embraces the military fully; and as much as I didn't want to admit it, Princess Myra, who largely goes unnoticed throughout the book because she is boring, is a devout believer in god and unconditional love.
The version I got had a preface saying that in their translation from Russian to English they tried to keep it as true to Tolstoy's original words as possible, and after reading some examples and the whole book I definitely got the impression that great care was taken to rewrite it in his style. That said, the hardest part of the book was at the beginning and end. At the beginning there is a large amount of french mixed right in with english and footnotes to bounce all around the page for translations and more footnotes for historical references. I think when I first started I was reading about 10 pages each lunch hour. The end was a whole different monster entirely though, which I really really wanted to believe that the second book of the epilogue was completely unrelated to the rest of the book but after some long reflection about it, one can find correlations. But god did it suck. He just ranted for like 40 pages about how historians interpret history and how everyone is free but no one is free. Ug, I was telling Laura about this and she said why don't you just stop you finished the story already, and I could only tell her if she had spent the last seven months doing something would you quit right before the end?
There are some parts within the story which Tolstoy goes on these ridiculous tangents on the nature of wars and those who fight in them as well as how history is interpreted. Here is of one of my favorite offshoots that actually made sense:
"A bee sitting on a flower stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and says that a bee’s purpose consists in stinging people. A poet admires a bee sucking up from the cup of a flower and says that a bee’s purpose consists in sucking up the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, noting how a bee gathers flower pollen and brings it to the hive, says that a bee’s purpose consists in gathering honey. Another beekeeper, who has studied the life of a hive more closely, says that a bee collects pollen in order to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that its purpose consists in reproducing its kind. A botanist notes that, as a bee lands with pollen on the pistil of a dioecious flower, it fertilizes it, and in that the botanist sees the bee's purpose. Another, observing the migration of plants, sees that the bee contributes to that migration, and this new observer may say it is in this that the bee’s purpose consists. But the final purpose of the bee is exhausted neither by the one, nor the other, nor the third purpose that human reason is able to discover. The higher human reason rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious for it is the inaccessibility of the final purpose."
It was parts like this that I went, WTF Leo, W.T.F.
Before reading the book I thought I wasn't going to understand it, and that was my biggest fear. Now that I'm done I think I understand the different ideas and themes to the story, and I'm happy I spent my lunch hours since July tackling it. Since I didn't know what it was going to be about I thought it was going to be full of ideas from a man who wanted to write about the nature of war and peace. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was a book about a guy who wanted to write about war, love, and god. While staged it in Russia during the momentous year of 1812. As a man who has recently had love on the mind quite a bit some of the ideas presented in War and Peace were really helpful in teaching me new ways to think of love and what its purpose serves in life.
"Love hinders death. Love is life. Everything, everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love."
So would I recommend it? Sure, if you've got time and patience.
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