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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2011Don't be afraid, take the plunge. Read the book, you will not only be glad you did, you will grow as a human being. I read many works of literature before i read this one, i'm a speed reader, i get through them very fast. I never skim but i can read about a line of text a second without loosing comprehension or the ability to imagine the actions and events as if they were happening in real time. And yet i was intimidated by this book, not because of it's length so much as because we generally have the idea that very long books that are considered classics have to be filled with pages of exposition, you know pages describing a carriage or a sunset or a coffee mug(i'm looking at you dickens!) but i felt it was finally time so i set off to my next challenge, to read war and peace in a month on my hour lunch break. To make a long story short, i finished in about 4.
What happened to me? i expected to find pages of prose and essays i could easily get through without having to sub vocalize, I expected to have to dig through mass amounts of extra words and ideas to get to the good stuff, which would motivate me to read at my top level. I expected to be able to get through a few chapters a day. But i miscalculated, instead of wanting to speed up, i found myself slowing down. I found myself reading not as fast, but as slowly as possible, to get the most out of every word. There was very little exposition, essays are only introduced in the later chapters and they add an interesting and vital perspective to the novel and also challenge everything i thought i knew about history.
The book is long because it contains so many characters, so many stories, and covers so vast a length of time. But you will be interested every step of the way. It did take the first 100 pages to really get exciting but once i got into the story, i went back and reread the beginning and found i loved every word.
I keep referring to this as a book as i feel it transcends genre or convention. is it a novel, an epic poem in prose, a very long essay, it is all of these things, and none of these things.
A coworker asked what i was reading and i replied "War and Peace". He asked what it was about and i replied "War and Peace". War and Peace is about war and peace, sorrow and joy, the duality and inevitability of these things in our life. it is about how we affect history, and how history affects us. It asks what makes us move as human beings, and as a society and civilization. It's about everything, i learned and grew so much while reading this. And for one of the longest books in the classic literary canon, it begs to be read again, and again. I have started a lifelong affair with War and Peace. Tolstoy asserts that some unknown and divine force is ultimately behind the moves and actions of men, and that histories greatest heroes are merely tools to this end. If that is so than he himself was one such tool. He has moved me.
Don't be afraid, take the plunge. Read the book, you will not only be glad you did, you will grow as a human being. War and Peace is as close to perfection as any man could hope to achieve in this life. This review was not necessary, the name says it all.
