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4.47 AVERAGE
4.47 AVERAGE
Okay, so I have a lot of thoughts that are still forming about this book. I have never read anything quite like it. I'll probably still be thinking about it in the coming weeks as everything starts to digest.
It was beautiful. Though it focuses on the misery and suffering of World War II, specifically the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman and his translator did so much to convey something optimistic and kind of hopeful about the human condition. His commentary on fascism and stalinism do not drown out the universality of the experiences. Yes, it is a political book with a powerfully clear moral ideology, but it is also about family, relationships, work, and love.
To be honest, it was hard initially to get into it. I definitely lost track of some of the characters here and there and am not sure if I can truly recount what happens in each storyline. But I don't think that was the point of the book either. Each chapter is like a little vignette, offering an intimate and tender peek into the life of a character. They are treated with forgiveness and mercy by Grossman, even if they don't always do the right thing. Grossman was even ambitious enough to include Stalin and Hitler as characters with view points.
I will need to reread this book to truly appreciate it, so I'll probably be back here in a couple of years hopefully with a stronger understanding of the politics Soviet Union!
It was beautiful. Though it focuses on the misery and suffering of World War II, specifically the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman and his translator did so much to convey something optimistic and kind of hopeful about the human condition. His commentary on fascism and stalinism do not drown out the universality of the experiences. Yes, it is a political book with a powerfully clear moral ideology, but it is also about family, relationships, work, and love.
To be honest, it was hard initially to get into it. I definitely lost track of some of the characters here and there and am not sure if I can truly recount what happens in each storyline. But I don't think that was the point of the book either. Each chapter is like a little vignette, offering an intimate and tender peek into the life of a character. They are treated with forgiveness and mercy by Grossman, even if they don't always do the right thing. Grossman was even ambitious enough to include Stalin and Hitler as characters with view points.
I will need to reread this book to truly appreciate it, so I'll probably be back here in a couple of years hopefully with a stronger understanding of the politics Soviet Union!
This is Grossman’s magnum opus - his attempt to say it all. Providing an update to War and Peace, Grossman’s huge tome covers a fairly narrow time when the the German siege of Stalingrad was at it’s Apex and then finally turned the Soviet’s way. The novel works on so many levels
- a panoramic history of Soviet life from peasants, the government, military, and sciences.
- A story of nationalism gone awry, especially as it related to the jews of both Germany and Russia
- A wicked takedown of the German and Soviet Union
- A political philosophy of the tension between the the state and individual. In the West it’s easy to forgot how this all encompassing repressive regime eats at your freedom in so many subtle ways.
- A moral philosophy of the nature of evil in the world - the fight of the individual soul to fight against the overselling force to crush it. Even the scientist Viktor, in many was the moral heart of the novel, is essentially swayed to and fro by his treatment.
- And yes, life and fate - the individual control or lack there of caused by life and fate.
In the end, Grossman’s main thrust is the individual is moral center. Given the times he lived, this is understandable. And it is a warning to progressives (like myself) who too often look to the state for solutions to moral problems. But herein lies a weakness in the novel. Even with its sensitive close analysis of hundreds of characters and many philosophical and political discussions there is a certain limit to the depth of the arguments. We now understand the moral equivalency of the Soviet Union and Germany Nazi state is no longer shocking and we have seen that rampant individualism caries it’s own harms.
Yet the novel is immensely readable and interesting, with a clear forward moving translation. The novel still stands as one of the great novels of Soviet literature - if falling short of Grossman’s stated goal of modern War and Peace.
- a panoramic history of Soviet life from peasants, the government, military, and sciences.
- A story of nationalism gone awry, especially as it related to the jews of both Germany and Russia
- A wicked takedown of the German and Soviet Union
- A political philosophy of the tension between the the state and individual. In the West it’s easy to forgot how this all encompassing repressive regime eats at your freedom in so many subtle ways.
- A moral philosophy of the nature of evil in the world - the fight of the individual soul to fight against the overselling force to crush it. Even the scientist Viktor, in many was the moral heart of the novel, is essentially swayed to and fro by his treatment.
- And yes, life and fate - the individual control or lack there of caused by life and fate.
In the end, Grossman’s main thrust is the individual is moral center. Given the times he lived, this is understandable. And it is a warning to progressives (like myself) who too often look to the state for solutions to moral problems. But herein lies a weakness in the novel. Even with its sensitive close analysis of hundreds of characters and many philosophical and political discussions there is a certain limit to the depth of the arguments. We now understand the moral equivalency of the Soviet Union and Germany Nazi state is no longer shocking and we have seen that rampant individualism caries it’s own harms.
Yet the novel is immensely readable and interesting, with a clear forward moving translation. The novel still stands as one of the great novels of Soviet literature - if falling short of Grossman’s stated goal of modern War and Peace.
As far as WWII stories go, this is undoubtedly one of the finest. The stories of the various characters are as epic as the story of how the novel itself came about. It takes place around the Battle of Stalingrad, and centers (for the most part) on Victor Pavlovich Strum, (a Jewish physicist working on nuclear research) and the Shaposhnikov family. Though, it takes major shifts following the lives of several different settings and individuals from a German POW camp, to (in what's one of the story's most memorable events) a cattle car heading to the gas chambers. In fact, it feels more like a string of short stories of unrelated characters, though as you continue, it weaves a very specific and moving picture. What makes this story so moving is the realization of two totalitarian governments fighting against each other. The comparisons between Soviet Communism and Fascist Nazism are inescapable, and a part of what makes the story so engrossing.
I got this as a radio play, and very glad I did as the web of characters (with impossibly similar, hard-to-pronounce Russian names) is a feat to unravel. Though, after finishing it, I found I immediately wanted to get the book itself, and read all 900 pages in full. It's a marvelous story, one that I'm sure the more I read and understand, the more I'll fall in love with. I highly recommend it!
I got this as a radio play, and very glad I did as the web of characters (with impossibly similar, hard-to-pronounce Russian names) is a feat to unravel. Though, after finishing it, I found I immediately wanted to get the book itself, and read all 900 pages in full. It's a marvelous story, one that I'm sure the more I read and understand, the more I'll fall in love with. I highly recommend it!
“... in 1961 , after the manuscripts of Life and Fate had been confiscated, Grossman would write to Khrushchev ,
I have written in my book
what I believed, and continue
to believe, to be the truth.
I have written only what
I have thought through,
felt through, and suffered
through.
...we have no more complete picture of Stalinist Russia.” —Robert Chandler
“And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century.”
“It was as though she were affirming that no power in the world could stop people from being people, that even the most powerful state was unable to intrude...”
There’s nothing more I might possibly add that would even begin to do justice to this volume.
I have written in my book
what I believed, and continue
to believe, to be the truth.
I have written only what
I have thought through,
felt through, and suffered
through.
...we have no more complete picture of Stalinist Russia.” —Robert Chandler
“And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century.”
“It was as though she were affirming that no power in the world could stop people from being people, that even the most powerful state was unable to intrude...”
There’s nothing more I might possibly add that would even begin to do justice to this volume.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
(SPOILERS)
Sometimes you read a novel at the right point in time. Sometimes this timing is a personal and emotional one— I've certainly read books that spoke to exactly whatever I was going through as an individual at the time (this books 19th century counterpart "War and Peace" is an example). But "Life and Fate" seems timely not to me personally, but to our world's current moment.
While living in Taiwan, my friends and I are, more than we were back home in the West, aware of the ever-present eyes of China. We had an air raid drill this spring. Some of our mail is addressed “Taiwan (R.O.C.).” Sometimes the mention of “Chinese Taipei” (as a cheat in Scategories) makes tensions in the classroom flare (sometimes the controversy is related to game points; but then the discussion goes off topic). And because of the proximity to China I am more aware of news stories regarding its oppressive government. We laugh at absurd stories like the banning of Winnie the Pooh on the Chinese Internet; other stories like the arrest of 900 protesters in Hong Kong this summer, or the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, are more serious concerns. It is impossible to be unaware of the anxiety that the non-China Sinophone world feels in regards to the regional superpower.
It’s easy to forget about the news back home, but sometimes something will happen that makes it come rushing back. The shooting in Dayton, Ohio made an impact on our lives because someone in the dorm has family there. The ever increasing mass shootings in the United States, the continuing brutality and murder of black people by law enforcement officers, the fear of ICE detaining and deporting people without due process, and the forced separation of children and parents at the Mexican border are some of the things that weigh most heavily on our thoughts when we think about current events in American.
These two countries have governments that could be described as terror states. But they are still adversaries.
Even knowing about the situation in both countries and the effect wrought on their neighbours, you find people who seem to think they need to pick a side. Some Americans who are “progressive” enough to recognize the evils of their own government come out as pro-China. In Hong Kong, you see some smatterings of pro-USA sentiment in the protests (some, admittedly, expressed by Americans in HK). Many people in an argument seem to think that since one side is definitely wrong, the other side must be right.
"Life and Fate" is set largely in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Grossman draws countless parallels between his own nation and Nazi Germany. The two are not exactly alike, and in fact the two are adversaries in the war— but while it is acknowledged that it is right to fight against Germany, his characters are not certain that it IS right to fight FOR the USSR. Sure, we know what we stand against— but what do we stand FOR?
I want to make clear: I do not wish to draw an equivalence between injustices and brutalities committed today in China and America to the Holocaust, or to Stalinist terror. I do not wish to blindly equate Stalinism to Nazism, either (and neither did Grossman). To make such a comparison would be ignorant, over-simplistic and disrespectful.
I do, however, want to recognize the parallels. "Life and Fate," after all, was written with another historical parallel in mind: the novel is billed as the Soviet era "War and Peace." The battle of Stalingrad is not really a similar event to the Burning of Moscow in the Napoleonic wars, but the parallel is there, and drawing it makes our understanding of history richer and more layered. It lets us reflect not on events as in a vacuum, but in a continuum, within a larger context. While the words of countless CNN anchors— “This is absolutely unprecedented”— may be true, it is also true that horrors for which there is not a precedent nevertheless didn’t just happen out of nowhere.
This brings us to the moral and political thesis statement of the novel: two governments, which are completely opposed to one another and may seem to be the opposite in every way, can nevertheless both be bad. That the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. And that we must learn how to spot and call attention to evil wherever it crops up, whether it is in a foreign land that we consider hostile territory, or right in our own cities, streets and homes. It is necessary to fight against evil, but we should remember that fighting against one evil does not make us immune to being evil ourselves.
This is a point that should be easy to understand, and in fact seems almost obvious if you watch enough news, or tally up the facts and ponder the observations Grossman so meticulously provides. And yet it is one that, in our current political climate, is for so many impossible to accept. This isn’t new, either— the sentiment was so incendiary in Grossman’s day that the novel could not be published in his lifetime. In fact, it is one of the only two books that was ever “arrested,” as a human being is arrested, in its manuscript form (the other being of course "The Gulag Archipelago"). While it may seem obvious now to point out that life was bad under Hitler as well as under Stalin, we should all ask ourselves how we feel about this message when we apply it to our own lives and fates:
Just because you’re fighting against evil, it doesn’t make you the good guy.
That’s my political take. Now for my literary take:
This book did not live up to the claims of the introduction that it would be “just as brilliant” as "War and Peace." I’ll admit that many of Grossman’s observations and musings on the nature of love, death, life, fate, war, peace and the like were as moving and as true as Tolstoy’s. But the fact remains— and the introduction did warn me— that it is not able to depict “the richness of life” as Tolstoy did. The thing is, I think this was a much bigger detractor than the introduction seemed to think.
The problem was maybe that there were just too many characters. "War and Peace" is no skeleton crew either, but at least the story does follow Pierre, Natasha and Andrei as clear protagonists throughout, enough to get emotionally attached to all of them. About 200 pages into W+P, I stop needing to flip to the list of characters provided by the translators. In "Life and Fate", however, with the exception of Viktor Shtrum, none of the characters hold centre stage long enough for me to get to know them. While I still might feel for their situations and find their narration illuminating and powerful, none of them is a friend to the reader like Natasha and Pierre-- certainly not so at 200 pages. I feel this most strongly with Sofya Levinton, a character whose fate as described by the introduction already moved and hurt me. And yet Sofya only has two sections in the book, one on the way to her death, and the other facing it. I might have wept when she reflected on the precious only-onceness of her life and the cruelty of her death, but I don’t know her— and I wish I did.
On page 600 I still felt as lost as I did on page 150 of War and Peace, checking the character list every time a chapter opened. To me, this took away the enjoyment of the novel. I like to get to know characters really well. But then, maybe the impersonal nature of the work, the overwhelming crush of too many characters, is intentional. I think about my professor Merve Emre’s theory of moving away from empathy when we read literature, how “relating to characters” isn’t helpful when we analyze a work of fiction. I never liked her approach and found it cold— relating to characters is what makes reading pleasurable. But should you read a book like this page-turning, curled up comfortably? Is it wrong that I read Sofya Levinton’s death scene while I was eating pizza? Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to relate to these characters. Maybe this book is not about characters— it’s about people, real people, regular people, living in the world. Maybe the state of their world is what matters, rather than the state of the individuals— a different approach from "War and Peace" (individual men even on the smallest level are the movers and shakers of history there— here we are all just powerless leaves in the stream). Maybe the point is that I don’t know Sofya, but I still ought to be able to feel for her death.
In the end, it’s true what they say about "War and Peace": it’s not a story, it’s just life. And "Life and Fate" is the same. But "War and Peace" is about YOUR life, reader— "Life and Fate" is not. At a certain point I guess empathy fails, there’s a certain degree to which we can’t relate. The conditions described in this novel are of the sort that I cannot possibly imagine, the horrors too specific, too great. It's like "War and Peace" if it was only "War." Tolstoy wrote for a war, a grief and a love that we should all be able to find present in our own lives. But Grossman was writing something specific, which is not about me.
I know Natasha Rostov, so I care about her.
But I don’t know Sofya Levinton, even though as I reader I witnessed her final hours. Sofya didn’t know David, and yet she held him as he died. Mostovskoy didn’t know Ikonnikov, and yet he read Ikonnikov’s last statement. So many characters in the novel are strangers to each other, whether they’ve never met, they work in the same lab, they share a bunk, or they’re in the same family: but they should still care, and so should I. I guess the other moral takeaway is that you shouldn’t have to know someone, understand them or relate to them in order to care what happens to them. "War and Peace" is all about universal human experiences, but maybe the result of a globalized 20th (and 21st) century is that we have seen the other, we see that we cannot understand their lives and experiences, we realize that a universalist take is futile and over-simplified. But we should still care.
The last thing I want to mention about the novel is my favourite part. Like the Great Comet scene in "War and Peace," it comes about halfway through. This is from Ikkonikov's last words:
"I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."
Sometimes you read a novel at the right point in time. Sometimes this timing is a personal and emotional one— I've certainly read books that spoke to exactly whatever I was going through as an individual at the time (this books 19th century counterpart "War and Peace" is an example). But "Life and Fate" seems timely not to me personally, but to our world's current moment.
While living in Taiwan, my friends and I are, more than we were back home in the West, aware of the ever-present eyes of China. We had an air raid drill this spring. Some of our mail is addressed “Taiwan (R.O.C.).” Sometimes the mention of “Chinese Taipei” (as a cheat in Scategories) makes tensions in the classroom flare (sometimes the controversy is related to game points; but then the discussion goes off topic). And because of the proximity to China I am more aware of news stories regarding its oppressive government. We laugh at absurd stories like the banning of Winnie the Pooh on the Chinese Internet; other stories like the arrest of 900 protesters in Hong Kong this summer, or the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, are more serious concerns. It is impossible to be unaware of the anxiety that the non-China Sinophone world feels in regards to the regional superpower.
It’s easy to forget about the news back home, but sometimes something will happen that makes it come rushing back. The shooting in Dayton, Ohio made an impact on our lives because someone in the dorm has family there. The ever increasing mass shootings in the United States, the continuing brutality and murder of black people by law enforcement officers, the fear of ICE detaining and deporting people without due process, and the forced separation of children and parents at the Mexican border are some of the things that weigh most heavily on our thoughts when we think about current events in American.
These two countries have governments that could be described as terror states. But they are still adversaries.
Even knowing about the situation in both countries and the effect wrought on their neighbours, you find people who seem to think they need to pick a side. Some Americans who are “progressive” enough to recognize the evils of their own government come out as pro-China. In Hong Kong, you see some smatterings of pro-USA sentiment in the protests (some, admittedly, expressed by Americans in HK). Many people in an argument seem to think that since one side is definitely wrong, the other side must be right.
"Life and Fate" is set largely in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Grossman draws countless parallels between his own nation and Nazi Germany. The two are not exactly alike, and in fact the two are adversaries in the war— but while it is acknowledged that it is right to fight against Germany, his characters are not certain that it IS right to fight FOR the USSR. Sure, we know what we stand against— but what do we stand FOR?
I want to make clear: I do not wish to draw an equivalence between injustices and brutalities committed today in China and America to the Holocaust, or to Stalinist terror. I do not wish to blindly equate Stalinism to Nazism, either (and neither did Grossman). To make such a comparison would be ignorant, over-simplistic and disrespectful.
I do, however, want to recognize the parallels. "Life and Fate," after all, was written with another historical parallel in mind: the novel is billed as the Soviet era "War and Peace." The battle of Stalingrad is not really a similar event to the Burning of Moscow in the Napoleonic wars, but the parallel is there, and drawing it makes our understanding of history richer and more layered. It lets us reflect not on events as in a vacuum, but in a continuum, within a larger context. While the words of countless CNN anchors— “This is absolutely unprecedented”— may be true, it is also true that horrors for which there is not a precedent nevertheless didn’t just happen out of nowhere.
This brings us to the moral and political thesis statement of the novel: two governments, which are completely opposed to one another and may seem to be the opposite in every way, can nevertheless both be bad. That the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. And that we must learn how to spot and call attention to evil wherever it crops up, whether it is in a foreign land that we consider hostile territory, or right in our own cities, streets and homes. It is necessary to fight against evil, but we should remember that fighting against one evil does not make us immune to being evil ourselves.
This is a point that should be easy to understand, and in fact seems almost obvious if you watch enough news, or tally up the facts and ponder the observations Grossman so meticulously provides. And yet it is one that, in our current political climate, is for so many impossible to accept. This isn’t new, either— the sentiment was so incendiary in Grossman’s day that the novel could not be published in his lifetime. In fact, it is one of the only two books that was ever “arrested,” as a human being is arrested, in its manuscript form (the other being of course "The Gulag Archipelago"). While it may seem obvious now to point out that life was bad under Hitler as well as under Stalin, we should all ask ourselves how we feel about this message when we apply it to our own lives and fates:
Just because you’re fighting against evil, it doesn’t make you the good guy.
That’s my political take. Now for my literary take:
This book did not live up to the claims of the introduction that it would be “just as brilliant” as "War and Peace." I’ll admit that many of Grossman’s observations and musings on the nature of love, death, life, fate, war, peace and the like were as moving and as true as Tolstoy’s. But the fact remains— and the introduction did warn me— that it is not able to depict “the richness of life” as Tolstoy did. The thing is, I think this was a much bigger detractor than the introduction seemed to think.
The problem was maybe that there were just too many characters. "War and Peace" is no skeleton crew either, but at least the story does follow Pierre, Natasha and Andrei as clear protagonists throughout, enough to get emotionally attached to all of them. About 200 pages into W+P, I stop needing to flip to the list of characters provided by the translators. In "Life and Fate", however, with the exception of Viktor Shtrum, none of the characters hold centre stage long enough for me to get to know them. While I still might feel for their situations and find their narration illuminating and powerful, none of them is a friend to the reader like Natasha and Pierre-- certainly not so at 200 pages. I feel this most strongly with Sofya Levinton, a character whose fate as described by the introduction already moved and hurt me. And yet Sofya only has two sections in the book, one on the way to her death, and the other facing it. I might have wept when she reflected on the precious only-onceness of her life and the cruelty of her death, but I don’t know her— and I wish I did.
On page 600 I still felt as lost as I did on page 150 of War and Peace, checking the character list every time a chapter opened. To me, this took away the enjoyment of the novel. I like to get to know characters really well. But then, maybe the impersonal nature of the work, the overwhelming crush of too many characters, is intentional. I think about my professor Merve Emre’s theory of moving away from empathy when we read literature, how “relating to characters” isn’t helpful when we analyze a work of fiction. I never liked her approach and found it cold— relating to characters is what makes reading pleasurable. But should you read a book like this page-turning, curled up comfortably? Is it wrong that I read Sofya Levinton’s death scene while I was eating pizza? Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to relate to these characters. Maybe this book is not about characters— it’s about people, real people, regular people, living in the world. Maybe the state of their world is what matters, rather than the state of the individuals— a different approach from "War and Peace" (individual men even on the smallest level are the movers and shakers of history there— here we are all just powerless leaves in the stream). Maybe the point is that I don’t know Sofya, but I still ought to be able to feel for her death.
In the end, it’s true what they say about "War and Peace": it’s not a story, it’s just life. And "Life and Fate" is the same. But "War and Peace" is about YOUR life, reader— "Life and Fate" is not. At a certain point I guess empathy fails, there’s a certain degree to which we can’t relate. The conditions described in this novel are of the sort that I cannot possibly imagine, the horrors too specific, too great. It's like "War and Peace" if it was only "War." Tolstoy wrote for a war, a grief and a love that we should all be able to find present in our own lives. But Grossman was writing something specific, which is not about me.
I know Natasha Rostov, so I care about her.
But I don’t know Sofya Levinton, even though as I reader I witnessed her final hours. Sofya didn’t know David, and yet she held him as he died. Mostovskoy didn’t know Ikonnikov, and yet he read Ikonnikov’s last statement. So many characters in the novel are strangers to each other, whether they’ve never met, they work in the same lab, they share a bunk, or they’re in the same family: but they should still care, and so should I. I guess the other moral takeaway is that you shouldn’t have to know someone, understand them or relate to them in order to care what happens to them. "War and Peace" is all about universal human experiences, but maybe the result of a globalized 20th (and 21st) century is that we have seen the other, we see that we cannot understand their lives and experiences, we realize that a universalist take is futile and over-simplified. But we should still care.
The last thing I want to mention about the novel is my favourite part. Like the Great Comet scene in "War and Peace," it comes about halfway through. This is from Ikkonikov's last words:
"I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."
En esta obra casi se puede oler la pólvora, escuchar las explosiones y sentir el dolor de la guerra que produjo millones de muertos. Un libro difícil (ubicado en la Segunda Guerra Mundial) leído en un momento difícil (en la Segunda Vuelta Electoral)
reseña completa: http://0enliteratura.blogspot.pe/2011/06/que-nos-jugamos-esta-semana-vida-y.html#.VhLYMfl_Okq
reseña completa: http://0enliteratura.blogspot.pe/2011/06/que-nos-jugamos-esta-semana-vida-y.html#.VhLYMfl_Okq
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
War and Peace if set during the siege of Stalingrad. A brief slice of life from all levels of Soviet society. A fantastic book, that is intensely sad and so rewarding.
So glad I took the time to read this book. And it is a big commitment. But all human emotion is contained within it. I have a feeling it will stay with me forever.