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A review by julian12
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
5.0
Grossman’s Life and Fate is an epic novel of Soviet society in World War II. It is the kind of book that keeps you awake very late, so late that you might hear the first birds waking up. It is a book where the deepest despair seems to smother last hopes – where occasional acts of “senseless kindness” are the only events that keep the candle of humanity, even if only tenuously, alight. These acts of “senseless kindness” are, in the scribblings of the mystic prisoner Ikonnikiv-Morzh, what sustain humanity amidst the flood of evil threatening to engulf us all. Life and Fate has made me more keenly aware than ever of the immensity of evil and how powerless it can make us feel. Ikonnikov’s speculations are fulfilled in the action of Khristya Chunyak when she helps the newly ‘liberated’ but exhausted prisoner Semyonov who has been turned away by others. Ikonnikov’s words seem like half-demented ramblings to some but they have the power to take us beyond the sectarian moral positions that dominate much of the novel and indeed continue to assert themselves in our real world outiside its pages. Through extraordinary set-pieces I followed this book to its conclusion. Maybe Grossman doesnt quite bring his characters to life as vividly as Tolstoy but as the novel moved towards its end I was conscious of a different kind of poetry in the long diminuendo that takes us through the working out of the sad incomplete destiny of Viktor the physicist. Even as it shows the possibility of survival this particular episode also demonstrates its human cost.
There is too much to say about this novel – it requires perhaps not one or two but even more readings to reveal its richness. I would make a plea for others to experience its depictions of suffering and stoicism. I know in myself only too well what it means to lack stoicism – even though my own difficulties are relatively slight and others would endure them with ease.
It is a panoramic canvas with many stories and struggles unfolding. The reader, while invited to share the narrator’s deep compassion for what befalls characters like Lyudmila as they experience a profound loss, is also looking on from a certain distance. The balance in the book is poised between the personal and the political and it is the latter that often seems to be the strongest presence. always making us stand back after being drawn in by individual fates.
I would like to leave this contemplation with a quote from Life and Fate in the English translation that gave some comfort to me
” Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”
There is too much to say about this novel – it requires perhaps not one or two but even more readings to reveal its richness. I would make a plea for others to experience its depictions of suffering and stoicism. I know in myself only too well what it means to lack stoicism – even though my own difficulties are relatively slight and others would endure them with ease.
It is a panoramic canvas with many stories and struggles unfolding. The reader, while invited to share the narrator’s deep compassion for what befalls characters like Lyudmila as they experience a profound loss, is also looking on from a certain distance. The balance in the book is poised between the personal and the political and it is the latter that often seems to be the strongest presence. always making us stand back after being drawn in by individual fates.
I would like to leave this contemplation with a quote from Life and Fate in the English translation that gave some comfort to me
” Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”