1.
“I’ve been thinking about whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels,” Elizabeth Bachner wrote recently in the opening to an essay about (among other things) the novel Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann. I don’t have an answer, but the question makes me think about how much of life is about loneliness and efforts to cure or soothe loneliness, and how much of art is about loneliness and efforts to cure or soothe loneliness; and how loneliness is a word — easily enough spoken or written, like death or love – but really it’s a deep sadness, which is also a force, driving so many of our desires and actions, and at the same time shameful and hidden and nearly impossible to live with, out in the open, in any authentic way.
David Foster Wallace is often quoted as saying that fiction is about what it is to be a fucking human being, and so I guess what I am saying is that there are days – not every day, but often enough – when it seems to me that what it is is to be lonely; to be in this state of deep sadness and estrangement, and to know – not so much on the intellectual, conscious level but on the level where shame and fear live – that there is something terribly wrong about this loneliness on the one hand, and on the other (in knowing the wrongness utterly), something also potentially beautiful.
2.
“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life,” writes Miranda July. “Where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.” July’s vision of life as relentlessly estranging resonates: we must “make it through” and, hour by hour, “cope,” alone, inside of our bodies. The “how” is where she seems to put her investigative eye, which is to say her hope.
In It Chooses You, July tells the story of how she became blocked in the middle of writing a screenplay, and, in an effort to get unblocked – to understand better one of the film’s protagonists (or, at the least, distract herself from having to) – embarks on a project: she begins calling people who advertise items for sale in the LA Pennysaver, asking them if she can come to their homes with a photographer and tape recorder to interview them — “about your life and everything about you. Your hopes, your fears…”
I read it while I ate lunch, and then, because I was in no hurry to get back to not writing, I usually kept reading it straight through […] Each listing was like a very brief newspaper article. News flash: someone is selling a jacket. The jacket is leather. It is also large and black. The person thinks it is worth ten dollars. But the person is not very confident about that price, and is willing to consider other, lower prices. I wanted to know more things about what this leather-jacket person thought, how they were getting through the days, what they hoped, what they feared.
July describes visits with individuals and households all around metropolitan LA. For sale: tadpoles, baby leopards, a large suitcase, traditional Indian clothing, photo albums, Care Bears, hair dryer, Christmas card fronts. July (and her crew of two) meet, among others, an older man living in a flophouse who is undergoing a gender transformation; a 17 year-old boy whose father has been laid off and who’s been inaccurately tracked as Special Ed; a man who reveals his house-arrest ankle bracelet and is both boastful and evasive about the nature of his crime; a childlike 45 year-old man who makes photo-collages on his bedroom wall of babies and young women; a middle-aged Greek woman who for 10 years has lived vicariously through the vacation photo albums of a wealthy couple she doesn’t know.
Most of the people July called said no, and so those who said yes, “the ones I met with did not feel random – we chose each other.” July offers $50 for her subjects’ time, and so a number of those who say yes are quite poor. Also, as the Pennysaver takes ads via phone and in-person, most of them don’t own or use computers (“of course they don’t, or they’d just use Craigslist”). All of them have a desire and need to tell their stories, to be listened to and to connect. So much so that, in more than one case, July and her crew have a difficult time leaving:
After a long time I began to understand that he would never let us leave. We just had to go. I silently counted to three and stood up […] We silently walk-ran to the elevator and Alfred hit the down button repeatedly until the elevator doors opened […]
I started to make a polite noise of regret, but seeing her face fall, I realized that refusing was the opposite of polite. I squeezed my iPhone in my pocket. Would it be weird to check my email right now? Or maybe read the news? […] The fullness of her life was menacing to me – there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. She wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her. I went home and immediately fell asleep, as if fleeing from consciousness.
What makes us uncomfortable, what both repels and compels us, is always worth noting, and July is both candid and insightful about this:
Michael and Primila and Pauline had exhausted me with their openness and their quaint inefficiency […]
Domingo was […] the person whom I felt most creepily privileged around. We drove home, in my Prius. If I interacted only with people like me, then I’d feel normal again, un-creepy. Which didn’t seem right either. So I decided that it was okay to feel creepy, it was appropriate, because I was a little creepy […]
It suddenly seemed obvious to me that the whole world, and especially Los Angeles, was designed to protect me from these people I was meeting. There was no law against knowing them, but it wouldn’t happen […] when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people.
In her Malina essay, Elizabeth Bachner quotes Kafka: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? […] what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply […]” July’s project is even more immediate than Kafka’s — not just reading books, but seeking out actual distressing human encounters, encounters with loneliness, in order to be awoken in some way.
And yet, her project is still relatively controlled, and measured; she can depart from her interviewee when she has had enough, she can determine the best subject-artist distance from which to extract material, transform it into “fictional conjuring,” through analysis, through reflection.
3.
With Jeff, One Lonely Guy, Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields, and Michael Logan engage in a different project from July’s, though with shared interests in the how of coping and in close-ups of lives that repel and compel, that hammer one’s skull with the force of loneliness. The book’s genesis, from Shields’s introduction:
In late October 2011, my friend and former student Jeff Ragsdale posted this flyer around New York City:
I-f anyone wants to talk about anything, call me. (347) 469-3173
Jeff, one lonely guy.
Jeff recently realized he sabotaged his stand-up and acting careers. He was down and out, living in a tiny room in a boarding house in Harlem. Having gone through a painful breakup this fall, he was extremely lonely.
The flyer was then re-posted on reddit.com and other social networking sites, and by the time of Jeff’s publication in January 2012, Ragsdale had become an Internet sensation, receiving over 60,000 phone calls and texts from all over the world. The book is a compilation of these texts and transcribed phone calls, “rearranged [by Shields and Logan] into this chorus of voices talking about the searing loneliness of existence in America at this moment.” Short personal vignettes and memoirs written by Ragsdale are threaded throughout the material, which is divided into seven (loosely) topical chapters. “This is the authentic sound of human beings, at ground level […] trying to connect in whatever way possible,” Shields writes. “This is Occupy Loneliness.”
Whereas July reflects on her own flinchiness in the face of too-much raw humanity, giving herself and the reader some breathing space, Jeff’s goal, it seems, is to break down all protective boundaries between those who hide, deny, or manage their loneliness and those who act it out; between creepy privilege and fully-blown desperation. The curation, or “rearrangement” of Jeff’s material is thus much less mediated than July’s; the texts are given to us in a barrage, one after the other, with only Ragsdale’s occasional (italicized) interjections, no less raw and searing than the voices of those who contacted him.
From the chapter called “Notes on Childhood”:
My first memory is of my parents rolling on the floor, punching each other’s faces, my mom’s teeth clenched. The police were always at our house.
I had counseling because my mom found out I was cutting myself. Please don’t tell anyone… Smiling makes you live longer… I’m better than I was in the past so I’m really good… In the beginning I got molested by my older stepbrother. I never told anybody for 4 to 5 years. He also rapidly hit my head against a wall and had 2 knives […] Will you be my friend? I am – it’s just that I don’t have a lot of friends. (Anya, 13, North Carolina)
I need a boyfriend that doesn’t want me to stay anorexic. I need a family that actually cares, minus the red tape. I need maturity. And I have Xanax. I don’t want to have to need anything. I don’t. I just want to disappear. (Erica)
I hire a sweet old lady to babysit my son and then I put a strap on and do men I meet at sex parties… It usually goes on in locked rooms and takes the guy months before he’ll open up with me… Men like it but feel embarrassed about liking it… My friend and me are a tandem. She doesn’t speak English, so whoever the guy is, he needs to know some Spanish or he’s going to freak out at this screaming Spanish woman. She likes to spank people while I watch. Sometimes she likes to walk on a man’s back, yelling at him, before giving him a blow job and swallowing… (I ask if her friend does intercourse.)… No, she has a husband. (Amy)
From the section called “Love Sucks”:
If I lived with you in real life would you hit me?… Do you think I’m pretty?… I don’t want to fight with you but I do like your dominance over me… Why don’t you want to be with me?… I can’t talk… I’m in the car with my parents… I know I’m only 17… Kidnap me… Please Jeff… How old are you again?… You’re basically the same age as my dad, that’s why I can’t tell them… If I lived with you I would want to take showers with you… I love you Jeff. You care about me… I will be with you someday Jeff, I know it… As long as you don’t start drama or I’ll blackmail you… I like you a lot but I want to be able to trust you. (Krystal)
My life’s all-time low was when I had sex with a 75-pound Asian hooker I knew had AIDS, but I was so screwed up on coke and alcohol I didn’t even care. I actually felt sorry for her because she had to pay for the cab ride over to the hotel I was staying in. She got on top of me and it was like screwing a skeleton. I couldn’t even look at her.
It’s a difficult book to read, even more difficult to summarize: 138 pages of continuous confession, desperation, tales of abuse and self-destruction – a deluge of uncensored loneliness. There are blips of exuberance and encouragement, along with the occasional scolding/derision of Jeff’s project (mostly from men). Some people write more matter-of-factly about typical problems – can’t find a mate, confused about my life’s calling, wish I was skinny, lost my job. Jeff’s passages reveal that he actually meets some of the women for sex and dates, ever hopeful that romantic love will cure his loneliness, even as he continues to obsess over Kira, the woman from the recent breakup. At one point he sums up their relationship thus:
I know I should have left the relationship. We both should have. I hit Kira in the face once, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.
And thus:
I remember that first punch. It started when I grabbed Kira’s leg. She sat up and punched me as hard as she could in the face. I actually saw stars. […] Things spiraled out of control after that. Our roommates were scared. They even slipped an eviction note under our door: “We’ve never been around this type of violence. It’s frightening. We know you’re not preparing for acting gigs, like you say.”
How are we – and by “we” I suppose I mean those of us who would not be likely to respond to Jeff’s ad – to engage with all these raw, ugly, lonelier-in-real-life-than-in-novels voices? Or is the project of Jeff as a book, as a text, packaged and offered to us as “America singing – singing a dirge,” intended to challenge our very conceptions of beauty and ugliness? Is Jeff meant to make the safe-at-home reader feel creepy about being protected, about the walls we typically put up between ourselves and these “authentic” voices? Or is the argument that all of us are these voices, distancing ourselves from ourselves, and walk-running to the elevator like July’s crew, at our own peril?
4.
In life people drift more, there’s less closure, there’s less follow-up, there’s even more murkiness – which is a lot of murkiness. Novels have a terrible intimacy no matter what – because of what’s exposed when you write one. Because of what happens when you read one […] There are all these people, real and imaginary, breathing against our faces in any novel, not just accidentally jostling us like people in a crowded bar, but knowing us, or making us know them.
Bachner is talking about novels, but she could also be talking about Jeff, or about It Chooses You. The “terrible intimacy” that Bachner experiences with Malina, with the unnamed protagonist Ich (I/me), is in identifying with Ich’s struggle to hide her desire to be loved, to play the aloof game with her lover Ivan.
Ivan needs Ich to play harder to get, to be less eager, to trot or gallop toward him less. He tells her, You have to stay in the game. She says, “I don’t want any game.” He says, “But without a game it won’t work” […] “While we talk I can never allow myself to think that in an hour we will be lying in the bed or toward evening or very late at night […] Extreme self-control lets me accept Ivan’s sitting opposite me at first, silently smoking and talking.”
Ich must always hide how much she wants Ivan to love her, she must be ashamed that her happiness is tied up in being with him. She must pretend to be the person who doesn’t need to keep telling her stories or confessing her loneliness in order to feel connected to something. She must mind her boundaries, let the crew leave and run for the elevator once they reach the threshold of discomfort. She must not respond to Jeff’s ad, not pour out either her ecstasy or her devastation. She must be self-composed, her emotional distance always calibrated. Bachner, like Ich, doesn’t want any game, any concealment of her hunger for intimacy:
The bad self-help book [she is also reading The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton] sees the only measure of my worth in another’s eyes as managing to detach and not want him, to go to the movies alone or with some guy I love less than Ivan […] to have sex alone or with someone I want less than Ivan, to sit in the bath and […] think about astronomy or Austrian literature.
5.
The last person that Miranda July meets through the Pennysaver is Joe, an 81 year-old retired house-painter and contractor, “an obsessive-compulsive angel, working furiously on the side of good.” Joe and his wife Carolyn have been married 62 years, very much in love; they’ve cared for and buried countless dogs and cats; Joe does grocery shopping for eight elderly neighbors; Carolyn is sick with diabetes; they live on social security. During the interview, Joe invites July over for Christmas, at which point she makes her move to exit, though not unaffected:
When we finally extricated ourselves, we just sat in the car, very quietly, and were oddly tearful. Alfred said something about wanting to be a better boyfriend to his girlfriend. I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough […] And yet this visit was suffused with death. Real death: all those cats and dogs, the widows he shopped for, and his own death, which he referred to more than once – but matter-of-factly, like it was a deadline that he was trying to get a lot of things done before.
July writes earlier in the book about how getting married and trying to finish a movie had made her fixated on death and time:
So all my time was spent measuring time […] And now that I had vowed to hang out with this man until I died, I also thought a lot about dying. It seemed I had not only married him but also married my eventual death.
July can’t forget Joe and Carolyn, so she casts Joe in her film. Then Joe gets diagnosed with cancer, he has just a few weeks to live. But Joe wants to do the film, despite his illness. The protagonist has his epiphany and transformation via meeting the character Joe; the film, The Future, gets finished. Before its release, Joe dies.
6.
Joe and Carolyn were not lonely, and not lonelier than the characters in the film, though many of the people July met through the Pennysaver were terribly lonely; July is the murkier character, drifting between art and life, running toward and away from loneliness. Elizabeth Bachner is living her real life, either at the movies kissing her Ivan, or in the bathtub with a bad self-help book, but still, we assume, finding connection and intimacy in novels. Jeff Ragsdale, from what I’ve gathered, is now both less lonely and more lonely, but it’s hard to say, because in real life, there is less closure, less follow-up. Today, I am having one of those days when what it is to be a fucking human being is to be lonely; but I’m reading a novel that’s just getting good, all these people breathing against my face, and plus, there’s always tomorrow, which is to say the hope of loneliness turning into an authentic voice, into something beautiful.
Image courtesy of .v1ctor./Flickr
In the same way that it would be hard to meet Scarlett Johansson and not be distracted by her beauty, it is difficult to read War and Peace and not be preoccupied with its reputation as the greatest novel ever written. As lay readers, the specific qualities that make War and Peace so great can be hard to assess. But just as it takes specialized knowledge to understand exactly why a magnet attracts metal, yet any five-year-old can identify a magnet when he sees one, it is one thing to apprehend the formal properties of a great work of art, but another, much more accessible question, to assess its effects. And so, having recently finished reading War and Peace, what I want to think about is just what it is that great art does.
“One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.”
During the time when I was reading War and Peace, I actually found this exact same effect to be comforting. I realized I wasn’t crazy and that the various thoughts running through my mind were the same thoughts others had been having for centuries. Sometimes it’s nice to know you aren’t alone or even original :)
Having just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov (also the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation) last night just after midnight, and today still reeling from the encounter, as you say, of great art on my ordinary life, I really appreciate your thoughts.
And for the time being, I’m swearing off epic length novels, and focusing more on novels that don’t require a quarter of a year to conquer.
Nathan, I like your interpretation of the ‘unoriginality’ point. And I would say I too, on the whole, found the universality of War and Peace to be more reassuring than not.
And Winston, thanks for reading. I’ve made a couple false starts at Bleak House in the days since I finished W&P, so it remains to be seen whether I’ve got one more big book in me, or whether it will be time to tackle more modestly sized novels for awhile
It’s funny what big books can do to a person. Earlier in the year I read “The Savage Detectives” and “2666” right in a row and when I was done I found my ability to read anything of any kind of length or difficulty to be completely demolished.
Lovely piece. In talking about what art does, I find it is always an assertion not of what we have done or where we have been but of what we can do. To pick one of my favorite examples, Cassavetes’ ‘A Woman Under The Influence’ is a portrait not of a marriage but of what a marriage can truly be, and expands understanding of why love matters now and forever.
I do think it’s the best book ever written. Nice piece on it. I read it during a physical, emotional and religious crisis in my life in my mid thirties. I feel like it honestly helped me through it, the compassion in it is that strong.
I loved your essay. I appreciate your point that as much as I might not remember a book in all its detail, I remember vividly where I was in life when I read some of my favorite ones and how the story shaped my perception of that time. In the spring of my senior year, a few months after my mother died, I read Marilynnne Robinson’s Housekeeping for an English class. The story focuses a lot on memory and loss, and it shaped the way I dealt with how my memory of my mom would change over time, a thought I was struggling with a lot right then.
Very nice post. I share your interest in and passion for War and Peace. In fact, since getting a Kindle I’ve been in the habit of reading a chapter of the book a day during my subway commute. As there are 365 chapters in the book I finish a cycle every year. It’s an interesting way to read the book.
I loved your sentence about how “the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.”
I think that must be why, when I was reading this novel, that everyone told me that I should re-read it every five years. Your experience of both life and the reading of the novel, changes depending on what’s happening around you.
I first read W&P about 3 years ago (oct 07), when the war in Iraq was flailing and the American public was angry. It was a really interesting experience to read all of those war passages at that time. I wonder what life will be like in a couple of years, when I do my first re-read of the book.
Maire and Brian, thanks for reading! It is nice to imagine that life is long enough to make room for more than one reading of War and Peace.
Really great piece. I found it hard to discuss this book with people without sounding pretentious, but I think you did a fine job of describing the allure and the magnificence of the novel.
Great essay.
War and Peace is clearly the best book I’ve read. Or the one I’ve enjoyed the most. Or both.
It also impacted my way of seeing things in millions of ways.
As for long books (I’ve also tackled 2666 this year and am now reading Against the Day), it’s not about the length, it’s about the book.
“…the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.” Spectrum and precision are two words so aptly applied to Tolstoy. The same could be said for this essay! I admire your taking on W&P is such a short space here, and yet covering so much ground. I’ve enjoyed reading about your journey with the book and especially appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read it in a “whole self” way, and to report it to us in the same vein.
Interesting to hear about your experience with the two translations, as well. Thanks, Kevin!
Thanks for the kind words Sonya. And thanks for reading the piece!
The more I think about it the more things I could say. Perhaps that is the greatness of a great art work – that it is rich enough to provoke all manner of responses even from one person.
I read it in three enchanted weeks just before my 19th birthday in about August 1977. I was unemployed and had the time to do nothing else for those three weeks.
Even though reading Tolstoy’s biography and thought makes me less impressed with the man than i was as a teenager the memory of the experience of reading it, though i had quite forgotten it, was summoned back by this article.
The praise for War & Peace has left me shaking my head and wondering what the heck you people have been smoking. War & Peace is the worst novel ever written. I’ve read technical manuels on how to repair computers that had better writing and more drama. It’s a long winded piece of tripe. A good editor should have wittled down this monstrosity of hot air to three hundred pages or less, but even then it still would probably be a bad book. If War & Peace is considered a farce, a social mockery of the Russian elite of that era, then perhaps I would consider it an okay book, but to take it as a serious piece of literature let alone consider it a work of art is shocking.
Kevin, I enjoyed your essay (found it linked on artsandlettersdaily.com). I love serendipities and this is one of the best I’ve experienced in awhile. May I explain?
As a life-long passionate reader, I decided to quit by job (as an attorney) two years ago, primarily to have more time to read quality literature. When people would ask me about this, my pat line was “I want more time to read–I want to be able to immerse myself in War and Peace”.
Well, I’ve been reading quite a bit these past two years (I won’t even try to begin to list everything I’ve read, but it does include Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”–all six volumes). In any event, last night I finished “Flaubert’s Parrot” by Julian Barnes and announced to my wife that at long last it was time to tackle War and Peace. So last night I pulled it from the shelf (I also have both translations you reference, but am reading the more recent one), removed its dust jacket and began reading the introduction.
Then this morning, while enjoying my first cup of coffee, I see the link to your essay. Imagine my delight!
Now I’m even more excited to dive into this masterpiece.
Kevin, thanks for reminding me of the experience of reading W&P. As memorable and moving a 2-3 week period as any I can recall having ‘lived’ through in ‘real life’
Nice essay. I would suggest a correction: While Napoleon’s invasion of Russia occured in the same year, the “War of 1812” more commonly refers to the war between the US and Britain. Your phrasing could be clearer.
I was a 15 year old asthmatic finding release through two agonizing weeks in the pages of War and Peace. It provided me with an escape from a painful situation and the characters were strong companions crowding around my sick bed.
This essay captures well that sense of a great novel as a world where the reader may live, move, and have another being. Good fiction extends the sphere of our living – not only in time and space, but in the life of the mind and of the emotions. It offers virtual change of air, light, relationships, experiences, perspectives. Its magic works inwardly for growth and renewal.
War and Peace is magnificent, but Anna Karenina is really the better novel. Just ask Nabokov. If you haven’t read it, wait a year to give Tolstoy a rest. Then give it a try.
I agree because Scarlett Johansen is really quite ugly and only reported to be beautiful because it says so in her press release – it is the same with Tolstoy. His nose is too big.
I too, can endorse the magnificence of “War and Peace”, but I would recommend “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo for a similar if not even more illuminating experience!
Excellent piece. I read W&P in my 20s, b ut the BBC dramatisation the 1970s had me fall in love with Natasha when I was 16. I’m still in recovery. I flicked your piece to a friend who is not yet engaged by page 50. This should spur him on.
I must read War and Peace. And you must, if you haven’t already, read In Search of Lost Time.
I came across this blog by accident, and I am delighted to have found it. It was referenced by someone who posted on a Proust thread which I follow. Anyway, it took me two attempts to read W&P. the first time I quit about a quarter of the way through. The second time, a few years later, i was more able to take the time and intellectual patience to appreciate this great work of art. While I respect the entire sweep of the novel, I think the description of the Battle of Borodin is the most profound account of war and its horrible aftermaths of anything I have ever encountered.
On a somewhat less profound note, I also like Woody Allen’s description of War and Peace: It’s a book about Russia….:-)
Sherm
I too came to this conversation through a link on a Marcel Proust thread I follow. Kevin’s description of the experience of reading War and Peace was delightful and made me decide to reread it myself.
Somebody else recommends Les MIserables. Hugo’s interpretation and description of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia is the complete opposite of Tolstoy’s and it is very interesting to compare the two.
According to Jerry Seinfeld, Tolstoy’s original titles for the novel was “War–What Is It Good For?”!
Now go read some Pushkin short stories.
It’s 25 years since I last thumbed through War & Peace and around 15 years longer since I actually read it. But just two weeks ago, I had a conversation with my wife about Russia, only to find Natasha dancing to the front of my subconscious, where she has hung around ever since, now joined by Pierre, Nicolai and Marya. I’m delighted to welcome my old friends back. Such is the power of this book! I must read the new translation.
Ironically, I am nearing the end of War and Peace just now. I purchased a Kindle about two months ago and decided to make it one of my first books (to make up for the latest Dan Brown novel that was, in fact, my first.) This article resonated most in describing how changed the author felt one hour after beginning the parts of War and Peace describing the battle of Borodino, yet without ever leaving his sofa. That is an incredibly insightful way of thinking about what art and literature do for us.
If anyone here is currently reading WAR AND PEACE or thinking about it, please join us in our online WAR AND PEACE summer reading group:
http://readingwarandpeace2010.blogspot.com/
We’ve just started the book. We’re reading the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. All are welcome to join in the discussion.
Great article – you basically articulated everything I’ve been thinking about all week (thanks to a sprained ankle, I just marathon-read W&P in 7 days). I read books too, to hear “life perfectly distilled into words” (hoping that I’ll eventually figure out how to do it too), so Tolstoy was fairly awe-inspiring. This book was honestly a joy to read… even though he didn’t seem to know what an epilogue is :)
Yes, even I instantly caught the “War of 1812” thing, and I’m no history buff, or anything. But this article is two years old, now, so I guess I’m just being a nitpicky troll for no goddamn reason, and long after the fact, even.
I don’t know who I am anymore.
Nicely stated description of the novel and its effect on readers. I bought the book in three volumes (Everyman’s Library) for ease of handling and finished it in a few weeks. I enjoyed Anna Karenina more, but there was a great enjoyment in reading it late at night. One had something to eagerly return to before the day’s weary end. I was less impressed with the battle scenes and catastrophes, but found the weaving of peoples’ lives through turbulent and remarkable times into a rich and thought provoking tapestry to be so worth the long read. I think everyone one says ‘Wow!’ when finished, both for making a real reading effort and for experiencing a novel everyone talks about, but very, very few ever read.