Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life

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March 16, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 46 5 min read

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coverIn 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 way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

The social consequences first.  It’s a fair bet that without War and Peace I would not know that my father-in-law read the book himself in two feverish weeks 35 years ago while on sabbatical in West Berlin.  People, as I discovered, tend to remember where they were when they read War and Peace, and when they saw me with the book they told me those stories.  I learned that my friend Paul read War and Peace as a 25-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia in the late-sixties.  He told me that the experience was revelatory in that it showed him that “a classic that came with the gravity of adult recommendations could be more engaging than life and easy to read, too.”

War and Peace lends itself to sharing with others more than most books.  I wouldn’t say that shareability is an essential element of great literature, but where present, it helps.  As I read, I frequently retold episodes from the book.  I remember taking a long walk with my wife in early February and telling her the story of how Pierre, who was kind-hearted but lacked will, became engaged unwittingly to Helene who was beautiful.  With my father-in-law, as part of a conversation about how to plan for the future, I brought up the tragic tale of young Petya Rostov, who joined the Russian army in a fit of patriotic fervor, but whose romantic visions of war blinded him to its dangers right up until the moment he was shot through the head.  And on a happier note, I shared with my friend Eric a retelling of the scene of Natasha at the opera, a scene charged through with the erotic energy of a young woman suddenly becoming aware of her beauty and the power it holds over men.

This is not something I usually do, tell stories from books I read, but 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.  The fact that the scenes in War and Peace are easy to retell is also in keeping with a claim my friend Paul likes to make that Tolstoy’s writing is so irreducible that the translation doesn’t matter. (For my part, I began reading the Maude translation and switched halfway through to the new Pevear and Volokhonsky; I found that while my mind was stimulated all the same, my heart raced twice as fast with the newer version.)

After the social experience of the book there is the intellectual one.  I have read other novels where 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.  Tolstoy’s intellectual agenda in the book was to expose the meagerness of historical accounts of the War of 1812 that tried to reduce the world-remaking conflict to a finite and knowable set of causes.  Instead, Tolstoy wanted to depict the war in all its complexity and contingency, to show that the outcome rested at least as much on the decision of an individual soldier to charge or not as it did on Napoleon’s machinations, and that both the soldiers and the Emperor were controlled equally by forces larger than themselves.

It’s an expansive idea and one that finds ready application in almost any facet of one’s life.  I thought of Tolstoy when reading about climate change (he probably would have been a skeptic) and when assessing President Obama’s leadership on health care (I think, based on his favorable depiction of General Kutuzov, who abandoned Moscow to the French in order to preserve the Russian army, that Tolstoy would have endorsed Obama’s decision to forego the public option).

I applied War and Peace to my life in smaller ways, too.  A passage about the forced idleness of regimental life clarified vague thoughts I’d had about how having a baby makes it easier to nap guilt-free.  And at one point—I may have been walking through a park when this happened—I stopped short after reading a passage on Prince Andrei’s decision to withdraw from life into the work of his estates that seemed, minus the part about the estates, like a mimeograph of my own mind.  (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.)

In the end, though, the reason I read novels is not because I can talk about them with other people, or because I’m looking for ideas to explain the world.  I read them for the pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.  In this respect, I don’t think there is a more able book than War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s singular genius is to be able to take the torrent of conscious experience and master it.  There are countless moments in the book where this happens, but the one that left me reeling was Tolstoy’s long, exquisite depiction of the Battle of Borodino, which was the deciding battle in the war and one of the bloodiest in history.

The night I finished reading about Borodino, it was plainly obvious that I had just read something great.  Yet here I was sitting in a corner of my couch, just the same as I had been an hour before.  I thought about the question with which I opened—what is it that greatness does?  An encounter with greatness, I would say, is like a bright light fixed in time, a marker that defines memory and makes it clearer than it otherwise might have been, that we were here.

Previously: Scenes of Retreat in War and Peace and Atonement, Selections from a Winter Reading War and Peace

Bonus Link: The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

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Essays

All Lit Up: Finding Style Advice in Classic Literature

Essays
February 16, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 1 6 min read

As a bookish only child who came of age in the ’90s, I got ideas about how I might become lovely — and as a result, I hoped, passionately loved — not from the style sites, beauty blogs, YouTube tutorials, Instagram videos, and Pinterest pages that are now ubiquitous, but from the novels and stories in which my nose was perpetually buried. My innate interest in beauty — spiritual, sartorial, skinwise, and otherwise — was stoked by 20th-century literature and the captivating female characters who populate it. Books I read between the spongy ages of 12 and 20 were especially potent. They inspired me to become a writer and invent fictional characters of my own, but I didn’t only long to write; I also longed to be written, like the heroines of these books — to be regarded with the kind of affection, interest, and attention to detail that infuses so many of the satisfying sentences their authors used to describe them. Inevitably, many of my choices and rituals concerning beauty and adornment, several of which persist, resulted from the images that bloomed in my imagination while I read.

In junior high, my hair — thanks to hormonal changes, no doubt — transformed of its own accord from fairly straight to extravagantly curly. I struggled to accept the sudden ringlets, which required an entirely new way of washing, combing, and styling. I also agonized over what I was sure was the near-fluorescent ruddiness of my cheeks; it betrayed, I thought, the awkward bashfulness with which I was often battling, and I tried to mask it with powder as soon as I was allowed to wear a bit of makeup. Then I met Ántonia Shimerda, the 14-year-old Bohemian immigrant to Nebraska in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. She was a character whose vitality, spirit, and earthiness I admired. And she had curly hair. And red cheeks. Ántonia’s “curly and wild-looking” locks make an ideal if temporary dwelling for a grasshopper she brings home to show her father. She “carefully put the green insect in her hair,” Cather writes, “tying her big handkerchief down loosely over her curls…,” and her cheeks “had a glow of rich, dark color” that Cather likens to “red plums.” Because of Ántonia, who was a role model of mine due to the indomitable strength of her personality and warmth of her heart, I embraced my curls and put down the face powder.

Eschewing makeup, however, demands vigilant skin care, and I’m grateful for potions that lend the face a lit-up look. One of Leopold Bloom’s errands on the eventful day of June 16th in the first part of James Joyce’s Ulysses is to have the neighborhood chemist make up a batch of the face lotion favored by his lush wife, Molly. Bloom marvels at the quality of Molly’s skin, which he deems “so delicate, like white wax.” At the chemist’s, he recites most of the lotion’s ingredients — “Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin…and then orangeflower water…and white wax also” — so I’ve been able to concoct an approximation at home with supplies sourced from the local health food store. Playing apothecary is fun, and I share Bloom’s sentiment that “homely recipes are often the best: strawberries for the teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk. Skinfood.”

Of course fastidiousness is crucial to both inner and outer beauty, and the skin of one’s body must not be forgotten in the effort to maintain a luminous face. Following in the footprints of the ever-fresh Komako, the lonesome young woman living at a hot springs resort town in the mountains of Japan in Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, I take frequent baths. Komako always seems to be coming from or heading to the bath: “[T]he impression she gave was above all one of cleanliness,” Kawabata writes. “Every day she had a bath in the hot spring, famous for its lingering warmth.” While my own bathwater doesn’t spurt from a mineral-rich spring, it’s usually infused with what I hope are similarly healing salts, plus drops of pine oil to evoke the conifers of Kawabata’s icy landscape. Just as I imagine Komako does, I like to do plenty of scrubbing to detoxify and promote good circulation.

Nicole Diver, the charismatic blonde with a sad secret in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, also takes a bath before beginning a love affair that will shift the trajectory of her life. “She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel…She put on the first ankle-length day dress that she had owned for many years, and crossed herself reverently with Chanel Sixteen.” This passage not only impressed upon me the degree to which literature can provoke an exquisite sensory experience, but also the importance of perfume application as an everyday ceremonial rite. Fitzgerald invented Chanel Sixteen — there never was such a thing — but the first fragrance I bought for myself was a Chanel, the softly shimmering eau de toilette version of No. 5. Then I caught it: the perfume bug, an ongoing fascination with odor as a kind of olfactory language that both makes and unearths memories. My obsession has not only inspired me to write a book’s worth of as-yet unpublished perfume essays, each one devoted to a different scent, but has also driven me quite happily from costly bottles of obscure niche fragrances to tiny vials of cheap but pleasing oils and everywhere in between. I don’t discriminate. I just want to smell like someone about whom stories could be written.

After bathing comes dressing. In D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, the cooler of the two titular women, Gudrun, is an artist blessed with an enviable sang-froid that remains unruffled even when she is catcalled by local miners — “What price the stockings?” — while stepping out in her signature boldly-colored tights. She has them in a kaleidoscopic array of shades and fabrics: “…grass-green stockings…pink silk stockings…woolen yellow stockings…” Because of Gudrun, I went through a brightly-tinted-tights phase, partly because of the aesthetic pleasure it gave me, and partly because I wanted some of her blithe attitude to seep into mine, though in actuality I was much more like her hypersensitive sister, Ursula, who dons no stockings of remarkable color but instead has practically got her heart sewn onto her sleeve.

Little finishing touches that complete a look come in many forms, including nail polish — an adornment about which I’ve always had mixed feelings. I sometimes put it on, but invariably remove it within hours. I love it on others the same way I love other people’s tattoos, but on me it feels somehow wrong, artificial. Maybe it makes me uneasy because I can’t help but associate it with Muriel, the shallow wife of the brilliant and sensitive seer, Seymour Glass, who figures in J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and other stories. When Muriel first appears, she is in the process of “putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.” Growing up, I — like his younger siblings Franny and Zooey — was heavily influenced by and devoted to Seymour, and it was clear the hopelessly mainstream Muriel just didn’t get him. “With her little lacquer brush…she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left — the wet—hand back and forth through the air.” This insouciant gesture seemed to embody all the spiritual poverty and bourgeois materialism of which I was sure Muriel was guilty.

Other finishing touches, however, feel the opposite of artificial, but rather like external reflections of one’s inner self. I’m never without my two little gold bracelets — one on each wrist. There is something about adorning my wrists — the gateways to my hands — in this way that makes sense. I like to write and make jewelry; my hands accomplish the tasks at the heart of my life. But I first got the idea to do this while reading my favorite of Jack Kerouac’s novels, the autobiographical chronicle of once-in-a-lifetime adolescent love, Maggie Cassidy The book’s title character accessorizes similarly. “Tonight,” Kerouac writes of Maggie, “she is more beautiful than ever, she has…little bracelets on both wrists; hands crossed, sweet white fingers I eye with immortal longing to hold in mine…”

I may feel complete with the bracelets, but there’s also sometimes a vaguely nagging sense of unfinished business: like many women, my thoughts often return to my hair, as they did in junior high. I may maintain its natural coiled texture, but what about the color? It’s a question over which I’m lately mulling, especially now that I’ve spotted and plucked a number of silvery strands. So far, though, I’ve done nothing about it. In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, witchy Eustacia Vye, fondly dubbed “Queen of Night” by Hardy, is a loner desperate for adventures beyond the bleak heath where she lives. She has inky hair — as dark as her eventual mood. “To see her hair,” Hardy writes, “was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow.” The romantic portrait is partly why in the era of ombré, “sombre,” “tortoiseshell,” lowlights, “babylights,” and all the other enticing iterations of highlights, I continue to choose, sometimes uneasily, to let my locks remain their natural nearly-black hue.

Consequently, not too long ago, an author of short stories and novels thrilled the bookish girl in me when he whispered that my hair was “so dark a seagull would love to die in it.” Oil-dark was what he meant. His statement, too, was dark—humorous, singularly strange and sweet, a compliment only a writer could give. For a few moments, I felt a little like a woman inside a novel. He answered the longing I’d felt when I first fell under the spell of fascinating feminine figures bound between pages and rendered only with words. I was no longer exclusively the reader or the writer; sometimes, I would be the one who is written, the one who is read.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 1 6 min read
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Essays

Exquisite Masochism: On Sex and the Novel

Essays
July 20, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 7 min read

This essay is taken from the preface of Exquisite Masochism, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. 

How do novelists describe sex and still maintain a respectable distance from pornography? As a formal plotting technique, marriage offers respectable cover for the secretive impulses of sex. As readers, we no longer have to worry about what will happen to a character once she marries; we know what she’s in for on her wedding night. Likewise, waves, oceans, blooms, and illuminations mark the sexual act within the respectable novel and allow a writer to refer to sexual action without realistically describing the act itself. Descriptive haze lets a reader experience sex’s capacity to dislocate personal experience. It alerts us to the fact of sex’s occurrence, and it absolves the writer of a particular kind of obscenity, one that comes of naming things as they are. More than this, though, fuzzy metaphor locates the description of sex as internal to a character. By describing a sexual act as a bloom or a wave, an author is not describing something in the external world. Instead, she is focusing on the internal register of sexual act — on orgasm and its felt experience, on seduction and its bodily effects. Metaphor, in other words, provides protection for writing about the internal experience of sex.

In the 19th and early-20th centuries, writers began to challenge metaphor’s reign in the novelistic depiction of sex. English novelists took to new strategies — drawn in part from the threats posed to embedded, domestic Englishness by cosmopolitan, financial power — to hint at sexual impropriety, perversion, and danger. Novels by authors like Emily Brontë , Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and modernist outlier D.H. Lawrence reimagined the marriage plot as sex found clearer and clearer representation in its pages, in states that, paradoxically, fell on the periphery of marriage: engagement, adultery, and widowhood. These novelists forged a representational shift in the ways books described sex, from descriptive hermeneutics to descriptive clarity — from the description of Tess Durbeyfield’s “mobile, peony mouth” to Connie Chatterley’s blossom-covered pudendum.

A specific kind of erotic scene is repeated, in different ways, across some of the central works of Victorian fiction: these are scenes of “exquisite masochism.” Such scenes feature powerful women and submissive men, often take place in highly aestheticized environments, and work as vehicles for the respectable novel’s sexual content. They stop or dislocate progress in romantic developments by taking genital sex off the representational table in favor of masochistic embraces: they are squeaky wheels in the marriage plot. These are highly charged scenes — scenes of sustained stasis, where plot and character drop out, description thickens, and a glance, gesture, or object takes on heightened relational significance. And recognizing these moments as scenes — in novels across the long 19th century — helps us see how the novel understands sex. These scenes take place across a wide variety of novels: consider the volatile tableaux inaugurated by characters as varied in their powers as the imperious Edith Dombey in Dombey and Son, the attractive, but mercenary, Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, and the voracious Lucy Westerna in Dracula. Despite their differences, these characters have one thing in common: they persistently disturb the de-sexualizing, companionable impulses traditionally thought to be central to the conventional marriage plot, and they do so by orchestrating scenes that depend upon their heightened sexual allure.

A long history of Foucauldian criticism has found sex where it didn’t appear to be represented; I am interested in reading nongenital sex as central to Victorian erotic life. Withholding sex, in the Victorian novel, is a perverse way of having it. In a novelistic milieu where illegitimacy or adultery can be the motives for serious tragedy, a fully developed sexual life presents a frightening threat. By describing erotic life in ways that avoid depicting sexual intercourse in favor of nongenital tension or intensity, novelists can render the frisson of sexual desire without the attendant plot risks. Novelists harness potentially disruptive elements — like sexual desire, sexual power reversals, and illegitimate pleasure — and put them to work in the service of, not just as a challenge to, marriage ideology. These novels often demonstrate an investment in the sexual power of characters, but they also keep these characters from any explicitly sexual connections that would muck up their novels’ respectably plotted, core marriages. Instead of presenting characters with a single frightening consequence to illicit sex — a baby or a disease — exquisite masochism disperses physicality throughout the scene, minimizing sex’s risk while accentuating its thrill.

There are a number of ways to recognize these scenes: primarily, they lie at the intersection of novel form and aesthetics. Often, they are filled with “exquisite” things, objects carefully chosen, painstakingly refined and delicate. These objects, and their relationships to the bodies and other objects around them, are precisely drawn — there’s a sensory scaffold that holds the whole thing together. Such scenes feel like vignettes, staged and managed for the consumption of a viewer (for the reader? the characters? a little of both?). The “staged” feeling comes, in part, from the sense that plot and action cease in these moments, freezing characters in statuesque attitudes, giving the reader an impression of a tableau vivant rendered in prose. Additionally, characters may be described as seeming like living statues, frozen in an attitude — static but humming with pulsing life beneath their inviolate exteriors. In a single novel, a scene like this might stand out and might trouble or resist interpretation: What is this passage doing here? But, by noticing the ways such moments appear in multiple novels across a wide historical period, one begins to see how they work as a type of scene, as a group of like scenes. And these scenes, taken together, demonstrate how, even before its clear representation on the page, the description of masochistic sex — that is, a description of an action that might not seem like sex at all — is essential to 19th-century plots about love and marriage.

A character’s feelings, too, can be “exquisite,” with a narrator, or the character herself, describing pleasure and pain mingling into a new, unsettling sensation. This experience often tips the character into an experience of fulsomeness — exquisite feelings are also intense, keen, potent, overpowering. These descriptions suggest that a character’s available sensorium is shut down, obliterated by the force of the experience she is having. In other words, “exquisite” scenes are a way of presenting passion’s power in novel form. But “exquisite” things and feelings aren’t necessarily salutary or good. Instead, they are finely wrought, and the intensity smuggled into the minute attention to detail in such scenes reflects the asymptotic relationship to pain that they depict.

To understand the elements of the masochistic scene, consider one of the strangest moments in a very strange novel, when Wuthering Heights’s observant servant, Nelly Dean, comes upon Heathcliff, staring, it seems, at Catherine the Elder’s ghost:

Now, I perceived he was not looking at the wall; for when I regarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something within two yards’ distance. And whatever it was, it communicated, apparently, both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished, yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. The fancied object was not fixed, either: his eyes pursued it with unwearied diligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly reminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred to touch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his hand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim.

Jettison for a moment the question at the heart of this brief passage (does Heathcliff see the dead woman’s ghost?) and focus instead on the physical scene it describes. Nelly perceives (or thinks she perceives) Heathcliff’s horror written on his face. But Nelly sees something other than horror there: rapture. Rapture and anguish, in equal portions, freeze Heathcliff in his attitude, staring at someone who may or may not be there, chilling his body so intensely that even a grasp for food fails. “Pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes” — here, the author describes a man moving — his hands “clench,” rigid, before they reach food — toward a starving death. Brontë’s inclusion of “exquisite” imagines there might be some kind of aesthetic satisfaction — or consummation — in Heathcliff’s experience. In all of its meanings, “exquisite” develops precision and cultivation so extremely that they can tip from pleasure into pain, from beauty into fastidiousness into horror.

Pain and pleasure: they are two feelings that, in mundane experience, seem thoroughly opposed. But when Brontë modifies them with this crucial word — “exquisite” — they mean something a bit different, something that confuses the senses because pleasure and pain blend into something new, something a little closer to erotic sensation.

“Exquisiteness” forges a connection between the realms of aesthetics and the realms of sensation, connecting the keenness of precise description to a different kind of keenness, the needling, sharp remnant of a discomfiting sensory experience. It implicitly connects taste and display to erotic desire. The confluence of these intense feelings — in precisely these words and in words quite similar to these — is one of ways the Victorian novel manifests sex and desire in its pages. In a number of key British novels, in a number of central scenes, these two opposed feelings occur at once, and, when they do, they create tension, excitement, and confusion in the characters that experience them. These twinned feelings appear in scenes across a wide variety of novels.

The novel used these scenes to work through ideas about the relationship between aesthetics and romance, and the relationship between romance and social life, and, further, to formally navigate the sex scene before modernism made it explicit. By alloying “exquisite pleasure” with “exquisite pain,” novelists found a new way to symbolize sex on the page. Joined together into an “exquisite masochism” — a pleasure that comes from pain, a pain that comes from pleasure — such scenes show how the novel demonstrated sex’s dislocating and thrilling effects, even without clearly representing sex itself.

The masochistic scenes at the center of this discussion rely on tightly ordered, almost scripted, interactions. Thus, they stand out from their surrounding texts with remarkable clarity. We can read them and not mistake them for descriptions of an ocean or a flower. These are scenes about people, and about their bodily interactions. Further, the zone of sexual experience these scenes describe is quite different from that described merely metaphorically. Once we notice the way masochism makes the sex scene obvious and once we see these scenes as reproduced over many novels, the contours of sex’s relation to the novel’s wider project becomes sharper. Exquisite masochism gives us access to the social effects of sex on novel form. I’m not suggesting that all intense scenes are masochistic, nor am I claiming that masochistic scenes alone can be described in scenic terms. Instead, exquisite masochism gives us a clear way to see spatial or aesthetic descriptions as signs of erotic connection. There’s often something inchoate in these scenes — an atmosphere, a feeling — scenes that don’t seem to contribute directly to plot or character development, scenes that appear to block or evade interpretation — what happens, for instance, when we read Heathcliff’s embraces with Catherine the Elder as sex scenes rather than just as signs of sex that happens off stage? But this approach develops one way of thinking about a much broader question in novel criticism: How do novelists represent vital worlds, and what things — what places, bodies, and plots — give those worlds their life?

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 7 min read
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46 comments:

  1. “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 :)

  2. 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.

  3. 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

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. Pingback: Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life « Kevin Hartnett

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. “…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!

  16. Pingback: Reading Tolstoy » Novel Readings - Notes on Literature and Criticism
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  18. 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.

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  20. 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.

  21. 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.

  22. 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’

  23. 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.

  24. 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.

  25. 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.

  26. 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.

  27. 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.

  28. 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!

  29. 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.

  31. 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

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  33. 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?”!

  35. 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.

  36. Pingback: The Millions: Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life
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  38. 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.

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  42. 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 :)

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  45. 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.

  46. 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.

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