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A review by christineliu
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Did not finish book. Stopped at 4%.
5.0
I've spent 30 days with this book and written 16 posts about it on Instagram (and definitely could've written a lot more), but formulating thoughts on 1400+ pages as a whole feels hard until I remember that Tolstoy's wife Sophia copied the complete manuscript by hand 7 times (and also gave birth to 13 children).
An essay by Isaiah Berlin titled "The Hedgehog and the Fox" posits that some writers (Dante, Dostoevsky, Proust) are hedgehogs, masters at expounding on a single idea, while others (Shakespeare, Balzac, Joyce) are foxes, who can't help but take on the whole of human experience. Berlin says Tolstoy defies categorization because while he's a fox by nature, he sees himself as a hedgehog.
W&P is a book that certainly has a lot to say about history and attempts to find cause and effect in events that are too complex, too multifaceted, too dependent on too many infinitesimal actions taken by too many people, to be seen clearly through any one lens. Although some of his ideas about war can feel quaint from where we stand, knowing all we know about the horrors and atrocities of the 20th century to come, they still give us plenty to mull over.
As a reader, I found a lot to love here — Tolstoy's minute attention to detail, his depth of understanding of each of his many characters, ideas about what it means to live a good life, and the feeling of being forever changed by a long journey, which is always a hallmark of a great book to me.
I would've liked to see the women given more agency and stake in their own lives beyond marriage and kids, but this was their reality. And for how often I hear that W&P covers the entire breadth of Russian life in the 19th century, I could've used more perspectives from peasants and farmers and serfs. But there's already so much beauty that it feels unreasonable to ask for more.
It's been a trek, and now I've planted my flag on this summit and joined the distinguished company of intrepid readers around the world who have scaled these heights before me. I've closed its pages for now, but this is a book with endless depths to explore, and I know it won't be too long before I'll want to revisit them again with new eyes.
An essay by Isaiah Berlin titled "The Hedgehog and the Fox" posits that some writers (Dante, Dostoevsky, Proust) are hedgehogs, masters at expounding on a single idea, while others (Shakespeare, Balzac, Joyce) are foxes, who can't help but take on the whole of human experience. Berlin says Tolstoy defies categorization because while he's a fox by nature, he sees himself as a hedgehog.
W&P is a book that certainly has a lot to say about history and attempts to find cause and effect in events that are too complex, too multifaceted, too dependent on too many infinitesimal actions taken by too many people, to be seen clearly through any one lens. Although some of his ideas about war can feel quaint from where we stand, knowing all we know about the horrors and atrocities of the 20th century to come, they still give us plenty to mull over.
As a reader, I found a lot to love here — Tolstoy's minute attention to detail, his depth of understanding of each of his many characters, ideas about what it means to live a good life, and the feeling of being forever changed by a long journey, which is always a hallmark of a great book to me.
I would've liked to see the women given more agency and stake in their own lives beyond marriage and kids, but this was their reality. And for how often I hear that W&P covers the entire breadth of Russian life in the 19th century, I could've used more perspectives from peasants and farmers and serfs. But there's already so much beauty that it feels unreasonable to ask for more.
It's been a trek, and now I've planted my flag on this summit and joined the distinguished company of intrepid readers around the world who have scaled these heights before me. I've closed its pages for now, but this is a book with endless depths to explore, and I know it won't be too long before I'll want to revisit them again with new eyes.