A review by camscampbell
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

adventurous challenging emotional inspiring slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I read this as a student in the final year of my undergraduate degree in 1998 at the age of 26. Coming back to it at 52 has been an absolute delight. I read it with Simon Haisell on his Substack, where he was hosting a one-year readalong of the novel at one chapter a day. It was a trip to be highlighting sections in my new edition—the delightful Penguin Classics Deluxe edition—and then discovering that student me had highlighted the same sections in my old student copy.

Simon is running the readalong again in 2025 and I highly recommend it. Search for Footnotes and Tangents and you'll find it.

I read the Anthony Briggs translation and it was very smooth. My only gripe is that he decided not to add the feminine -a suffix to the women characters' surnames and it was almost a deal-breaker. Julie Karagin just seems so wrong! I was pleased that he'd missed out the French though; that gets tedious in the Maude translation. So, pros and cons I suppose.

But man, what a novel. I feel enriched for having read it again and am contemplating having another go next year with the Russian in order to work on my rusty atrophied language skills. Honestly, it's a novel I could happily go right back to the start and read again right now. The characters feel like friends; different characters are favourites on different days: Nikolay on the bridge at Austerlitz, wondering why the French are shooting at him; Natasha in the greenhouse with her doll and having Boris kiss it; Count Rostov dancing the Daniel Cooper; Andrei on the ground beside the fizzing shell at Borodino; Pierre and Platon Karataev as prisoners of war; Kutuzov reading a novel; the mummers dressing up... there's just so much and it feels like I lived those experiences with the characters. I don't think I've experienced anything quite like that in any other novel, not even Anna Karenina.