On coming to the end of War and Peace

With the holidays over the last couple of weeks, I took an "accidental hiatus" from the blog--sorry about that. I was also working really hard on finishing the goal I set myself this January--to read War and Peace. And guys--I totally did it! Just landed on page 1215 this past Sunday, in fact.

Reading Tolstoy--and especially War and Peace--is mind-boggling, both for the sweeping, epic nature of the tale, as well as for how Tolstoy's omniscient (all-seeing) narration isn't afraid to zoom in and out of historical scenes at a head-spinning pace. According to the introduction of my edition (see source below), Tolstoy had a couple of big aims in this novel--one was to cross-examine conventional ideas about history and historical analysis, but the other was to tell the truth of history "to scale"--at the level of the average human being living it--so to speak. 

As a final tribute to the novel, I'm including one of my favorite parts of the book--where one of the main characters, Andrei Bolkonsky, a military adjutant, is in the middle of a losing battle, and despite this, bravely takes up the Russian standard and charges the enemy French. Within 4 paragraphs, Tolstoy brings Andrei from his role as a soldier in a batallion, moving through the "fog of war" in the blur of collective activity, to his role as an individual, a human, and finally, a moral being, who is forced to contemplate a larger reality beyond battle and beyond himself--God. It's quite beautiful and moving, and according the introduction of the edition I read (see the source below), part of Tolstoy's effort to capture the truth of the experience. Here you go--in pictures, because I wasn't up to typing the whole section up, sorry (you can blow it up and zoom in to read--the res should be high enough).

Pages from: War and Peace. eds. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, NY: Vintage Classics; 2008. Vol. 1, Part 2, VIII, pp180-181.

Life on the page

Right now, I'm reading War and Peace, as translated by the husband-and-wife team, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I don't know much about the two, except that I love their photo (left) and I want to adopt them.

I do know that the thing I like best about reading Tolstoy are those moments when his eye-of-God narration really gets "life on the page." Like this paragraph, where the opposing French and Russian armies are just yards apart, waiting for combat to start. Tolstoy dives into their collective thought bubble with:

"One step beyond that line, reminiscent of the line separating the living from the dead, and it's the unknown, suffering, and death. And what is there? who is there? there, beyond this field, and the tree, and the roof lit by the sun? No one knows, and you would like to know; and you're afraid to cross that line, and would like to cross it; and you know that sooner or later you will have to cross it and find out what is there on the other side of that line, as you will inevitably find out what is there on the other side of the death...."

To me, this is an earnest (and true) expression of what it's like to be on the brink of some major life event--that incredible torture of both wanting to know and not wanting to know, while also understanding that knowing won't make a difference: our futures are as inevitable as they are unimaginable. When I read this, I feel like I recognize my own experiences on the page, and that--to me--is one of the best gifts a writer can give.

Quote from: War and Peace. eds. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, NY: Vintage Classics; 2008. Vol. 1, Part 2, VIII, p141, para 2.

Hands down the best opening ever

It's tough to know where to start with a blog, but since this is my very first post ever, I thought--why not begin with beginnings? So here I am, opening with the opening to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides—read it and weep. Oh, also, just to torture yourself, guess how many words it was (answer at bottom of post).

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began. (p3, ¶1)

What’s totally great and unusual about this is that the opening tells you what is going to happen in the rest of the story. No spoiler alert—just boom! Out with the events to come.

You probably wouldn’t always want to do this, I’m guessing, but in this case, but it really grabbed my attention. First of all, the fact that multiple daughters from same family are going to commit suicide is insanely interesting. But it still leaves open the mystery of how and why, which gives me something that I really badly want to spend a whole novel figuring out. Then there’s the first hint that something disastrous—and maybe even sinister—has happened (the line about the bushes growing monstrous is really ominous), and that this story will be told by an outside community looking in (the paramedics move too slowly “in our opinion”), which adds an extra layer of narrative intrigue and a voyeuristic feel. And finally, there’s a dark, gallows-type humor in the situation of the ragamuffin EMS team called out for the umpteenth suicide scene.

But, in my opinion, I think the clincher is that final line, the one about “when the trouble began”—it takes a really effective, authoritative narrator to make a reader want to jump back in time, all the way back to the beginning of a tale, after just one paragraph. With most beginning writers, this would be the point where the reader thinks Oh, God, please don't kill me with backstory, but in this case, we want to know everything. Or at least I do! And it’s all done in a really compact space (see below).

Answer to how many words in the opening paragraph: 48. That’s right—there are fewer words in this paragraph than American states. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Quote from: Jeffrey Eugenides. The Virgin Suicides. London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing; 2002. (paperback edition)