War and Peace

May 31, 2011 14:53

Okay, I promised a detailed review when I finished, and I did finish the book this weekend. You can read my review on Goodreads, too.



For the most part, I found the book engaging. The characters were interesting, the scenes evocatively written. Much of what he wrote about being in a battle just felt so true to me! I suppose it sounds silly for a reenactor to say "OMG that's just what it's like" when our battles risk no lives, only honor and a few bruises, but even so, I found myself reminiscing about the excitement of the march, the joy of the charge, and then the frenetic confusion of engagement.

Of course, there is tragedy aplenty in the book, where people are running into open fire, dying needlessly. The book opens in 1805, with Russia coming to the aid of Austria against Napoleon, and then in 1807 changing sides an allying with Napoleon, and then ends in 1812, when Napoleon invades Russia and is eventually defeated, more by the deprivations of being so far from his supplies and the cold Russian weather than by the Russian forces, though battles are fought and many lives lost on both sides.

Woven into that history are the tales of a group of aristocratic families, the Bolonksys, ruled by a strict and kinda wack patriarch, whose son Andrei is cynical and yet idealistic, a very smart guy who seems unable to be happy despite having wed the beautiful "Little Countess". At the start of the book he yearns to leave behind the artificiality of salon parties and enter into warfare, sure that he's going to be a hero and all full of readings in military tactics and history - his father no doubt contributing as he is a retired general.

Contrasting with worldly, angsty Andrei is Pierre - the bastard son of a wealthy count who kinda sleepwalks pleasantly through life, and is seen play-acting on his own at being Napoleon, whom he admires in a kind of star-struck way. Pierre reminded me of the sort of privileged dork who gets pushed through life by his money without noticing it - you meet them a lot in private colleges. I instantly disliked him and felt little pity when he, upon inheriting all his father's money, is instantly seized upon by opportunists who tell him how to spend his money, taking a lot for themselves. (Some of these opportunists are the best characters!) Pierre simply doesn't care. He doesn't have to. He marries who he is thrown into, and takes a job that is given to him. He is lazy and fat and lives a life of dissipation, running with bad boys like the glorious bastard Dolokov, who may or may not have slept with Pierre's wife, and whom Pierre wounds in a duel, much, I think, to Pierre's surprise as well as Dolokov's.

The rest of the main characters are the Rostov family, led by a hapless, jolly, hopelessly generous Count Rostov, who simply can't manage his affairs because he's always giving away money to everyone who needs it. You can't help but want the best for the Rostovs, their young sons, their beautiful daughter and her cousin who lives with them. Right off the bat, their eldest son is enlisting in the war and you're all "NOOOOO save the Rostovs!!"

Much of the drama of the book revolves around young Natasha Rostov falling in love with Andrei, who proposes, and all is 'aw! We're so happy! Let's not be creeped out by the fact that she's 15 and Andrei is an adult'... but then Natasha briefly has a flirtation with a scoundrel who tries to kidnap her, promising a wedding and really just thinking about bonking her while he has already married a woman in Polond at the point of that gal's father's saber.

(Oh, in the meantime, Andrei's wife dies in childbirth while he's away learning that war actually sucks. He arrives home, emaciated and wounded, just in time to watch her die. Warm fuzzies all around! So he's kind of a new man, grieved like woah and Natasha has restored his hope in life so it's good and all, but I still can't get over the fact that she's, like, a CHILD.)

Anyway, Andrei learns about the would-be-seduction, and like all men of the time period assumes that since she might have kissed the guy she has clearly been reduced to damaged goods and he won't have anything to do with her. Dick. He rushes off into the army again, gets wounded, nearly dies, we are even told that he's dead, but no! He's alive, he makes it home to Natasha only to forgive her and then die in her arms. I was really pissed at Tolstoy for doing that. Andrei goes through holy hell, you know? And despite his dickish behavior to Natasha (and to his first wife) I really identified with him.

Meanwhile, Pierre continues bumbling around, getting mad when things don't thrill and amaze him, hating his wife who is probably unfaithful to him, or else is just, you know, really flirty.

Then like an idiot he rides out to see a battle just cause, gosh! Battle! Exciting! And the simple-minded fool is told to 'sit here' next to a battery that takes heavy losses, and he just... sits there. He thinks its swell and is rather slow in realizing that people around him are DYING. He falls a bit in love with the soldiers and then watches them die. Actually, this scene is pivotal and got me to stop hating Pierre.

He then resolves to kill Napoleon himself, bless the simpleton, and sneaks out of his house while Moscow is being evacuated, and gets someone to give him a peasant's coat and a gun.

Pierre fails to kill Napoleon and instead saves the life of a French officer and befriends him. Then he saves a little girl from a fire and stops a French soldier from stealing the jewelry off a pretty young woman. Pierre is getting his hero on! For all of one day. He's captured by the French as POW and spend months in misery.

But as POW he meets this kindly old peasant who teaches him about inner peace.

He survives and goes and marries Natasha, and his wealth saves the Rostov family.

The End.

Okay, so I'm leaving a lot of sub-plot out - like how the Rostov's youngest son, just a kid at the beginning, enlists right at the end, rushes out into battle and DIES HORRIBLY and the whole family is shaken and I sobbed all over my book when his mother found out. Petya! How could that happen to Petya! He was so like his father!

But there's the brutal inevitability to it. Even though the war was really already won and over, and the French were just trying to get the hell out of Russia, the call to glory made Petya search again and again for just the point where he could get killed.

At its best, War and Peace is a poignant tale about the hard truths of war, how senseless it is and how we senselessly get into it.

Then he goes and ruins it with pages and pages of essays. Let me sum those up: Generals do not direct the war. They react to it, just like everyone else. The force of history is the movement of humanity in mass and a complex mesh of interwoven chains of cause and effect.

There, did we need a gajillion pages to explain that? Apparently so. Tolstoy was obviously afraid we were very thick and wouldn't get it. I'm told there are versions of the book that excise these useless passages and put them in an appendix. I strongly recommend reading one of those versions!

Because, honestly, Tolstoy's fiction delivered the message much more directly on its own.

reading

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