(But “could you read War and Peace in a week,” Tim Dowling teased in those same pages?) (Now he tells me….) Hensher also swears one can read War and Peace “in 10 days maximum.” Very likely, if you approach it without fear or prejudice, and take some vacation time. And “anyone who tells you that you can skip the ‘War’ parts and only read the ‘Peace’ parts is an idiot,” writes Philip Hensher at The Guardian. (At least before David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.) The daunting length and complexity of its narrative can seem uniquely forbidding, though it’s equaled or exceeded in bulk by the books of early English novelist Samuel Richardson or later masterworks by the German Robert Musil and French Marcel Proust (not to mention the 8,000 page, 27-volume roman Men of Goodwill by Jules Romains.)īut where it may be necessary in certain circles to have a working knowledge of À la recherche du temps perdu’s “ madeleine moment,” one needn’t have read every volume of the painstaking work to get the main flavor for this reference. Tolstoy’s novel, on the other hand, is all of a piece, an operatic text of so many disparate threads that it’s nearly impossible to follow only one of them. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel of Russia in the Napoleonic wars, has for some time borne the unfortunate, if mildly humorous, cultural role as the ultimate unread doorstop.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |