The World of War and Peace

 

You dread crossing that line, and yet you still want to cross it. You know sooner or later you will have to go across and find out what is there beyond it, just as you must inevitably find out what lies beyond death. Yet here you are, fit and strong, carefree and excited, with men all around you just the same - strong, excited and full of life. This is what all men think when they get a sight of the enemy, or they feel it if they do not think it, and it is this feeling that gives a special lustre and a delicious edge to the awareness of everything that is now happening.

- War and Peace

How can one do justice to a book like this? No short or long blog post would be able to. This book is epic: it spans war time in Russia, with the impending approach of Napoleon and his French army. And yet it's small scale at the same time - It invites the reader into the families - parents, sons and daughters. Their good choices, bad choices, and everything in between. It takes you onto the battlefield dashing between bullets and explosions. Our characters we get to know are out there in danger. They are also at home dealing with those elements of family we might be familiar with.

Princess Marya stayed out on the terrace. Morning had broken into a day of hot sunshine. She could take nothing in, think of nothing, and feel nothing beyond her passionate love for her father, a love that seemed to have escaped her understanding until this moment. She hurried out into the garden sobbing, and ran down the paths between Prince Andrey's recently planted line-trees that led to the pond. 

I started reading War and Peace well over a year ago, but had to pause it often as I very often wanted to finish another book or focus elsewhere. But I decided to devote my time recently so I could finish it. The Russian tale by Leo Tolstoy fills over 1,300 pages and covers several years during the Napoleonic War mostly the years 1805 - 1812. Each chapter is like a short episode - a scene in the family or on the battlefield. Very readable these chapters are, and if you took out the Russian notions of Counts and Princesses it could read like other family dynamics. 

"Tell the King of Naples," said Napoleon stiffly, "that it is still not midday, and I cannot yet see my chess-board clearly. you may go."

The variety of characters (real and fiction) covers a huge range. From Russian families you have Napoleon on the battlefield with his officers. His pompous confidence jumps off the pages as he treads over the land into Russia. He stomps into Moscow in his victorious march. Yet you as the reader know there is a downfall coming. His end is coming. You can catch a glimpse of this in the encounter Pierre has with a French soldier. Tolstoy captures such amazing moments of humanity.

Davout looked up again and stared closely at Pierre. For several seconds they looked at one another, and it was this look that saved Pierre. The business of staring at each other took them beyond the realm of warfare and courtrooms; they were two human beings and there was a bond between them. There was a single instant that involved an infinite sharing of experience in which they knew they were both children of humanity, and they were brothers.

Pierre is capture by the French, and it is in his difficult times of being held as a prisoner that he discovers great joy in life. Pierre is a character you like from the beginning. He is large in size, large in spirit, awkward and yet loving, inheriting a fortune he doesn't really want and feels strange in. He stumbles in his status and he's always seeking out truth in his various ventures. His experience of hardship as a prisoner frees him from the binds that he had always felt around him. and you cheer him on, as he's such a likeable character. 

I've heard it said that War and Peace doesn't really have a plot or a story, but I would argue that it follows life, which is a big story with a plot you don't know until you've run into it. Tolstoy sneaks many of his philosophical ideas into these episodes, which is an antidote to sometimes feeling overwhelmed with scenes of battle. And then there are scenes with beautiful moments sitting beside beloved characters you've been on this long journey with that cause you to pause as a reader.

"Love gets in the way of death. Love is life. Every single thing I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is - everything exists - only because I love. Everything is bound up with love and love alone. Love is God, and dying means me, a tiny particle of love, going back to its universal and eternal source." 

Summer Pages

The hot, sultry months of summer. What is the best way to spend these sun-soaked days so intensely hot the daily temps near the triple digits? You know what I would say - get cosy inside, get a cold drink (my current obsession is iced matcha) and read good books! That is your summer homework. Pretty simple. What are your summer reads?

At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie

Summer is not complete unless you read a murder mystery. Taking place at a classic English hotel on a quieter street in London, Ms. Marple goes to stay at Bertram's Hotel on holiday. It's a perfectly charming hotel, the last of the truly British hotels with real muffins, butter, and tea time. Hospitality and decor is top notch, but darkness is looming underneath the surface. Strange scenes start to occur. Characters act in suspicious ways. Ms. Marple notices these things, but kind of stores them away for later. When a murder occurs just outside the hotel, things must be solved, and Ms. Marple's excellent memory is a key to solving the case.

High Time by Hannah Rothschild

In the world of finance, crypto-currency, and shorting stocks, there's a ton of room for the rich and greedy to become more rich and greedy, to cast themselves into immoral situations. A modern book is not often my cup of tea, but this one connected with the world of finance caught my eye, as well as the location at a castle in Cornwall. It is high drama, ultra rich making things worse for themselves. Deceit in the world of finance steeps into personal relationships, breaking everything apart. Ponsi schemes still work on the foolish and desperate. It was a little bit too flashy in those ways. I think the sympathy was supposed to be with the main character, as her husband set out to leave her penniless in pursuit of his ideas, but I didn't feel sympathy for her, nor anyone in the book, for every character in this world was a deceiver.

John Milton Selected Poems

A selection of his greats. Milton wrote during the most tumultuous time in English history (their civil war). Includes some of his most well-known poems and large chunks of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. I haven't spent a long time studying and reading Milton, so I thought it was a good time to do that. Plus this lovely edition of the Penguin classic cover is hard to resist.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 

An explosion at a museum. The 'unintentional' act stealing a painting and keeping it hidden for years (in memory of his mother killed in the explosion), the decision made as a young teen haunts Theo and changes the course of his life into a slippery slope of a dark world. Donna Tartt is a brilliant writer. She writes about one book per decade, and each is a masterpiece in its complex way. She takes you into dark worlds, but you are so drawn in as a reader, and there are deeper truths that she is wanting to show through her characters. Philosophical questions are raised throughout the book - what is a good life? Do we choose a good life, do we make it, is it handed to us? What happens when you are turning into your father (who left you and treats you badly) when you deeply loved and admired your mother and would want to be more like her? Seeing in the distance the good you want, but not being able to get there because of different transition points and the choices made at each.

A Sultry Month by Alethea Haytor 

It's June/July, 1846 in London. A heatwave spans weeks where the temperatures hit 100+ on a regular basis. This literary journey takes us into events taken from the diaries, letters, records, and news from the lives of creatives like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Haydon. This snapshot from a hot June/July 1846 was written in the 1960s but reads like a  modern group biography, of which this is a first of its kind. When it's summer now and the long-term heat wave is ever-present, it was a perfectly timed read.