there can be few better ways to spend your time than reading James Wood on Leo Tolstoy.
War and Peace is some crazy shit. As Mr Wood reminds us, in this beautiful review of a new translation, it breaks every rule of good writing. Tolstoy started off trying to write a perfectly constructed domestic drama in the mode of Thackeray but ended up way, way off-piste. Whereas a 'good novelist' would create an opening scene that sets up the major characters and themes of the story in suitably dramatic fashion, War and Peace comes in through a side-door, at a fairly insignificant party, before proceeding to range and ramble across an insanely wide range of events and characters, interrupted by a ranting authorial voice lecturing us on his theory of history, and ending with what seems to be a trivial epilogue. Sentences are piled up in untidy heaps, adjectives are repeated three times in the space of a paragraph, and tautologies are thrown out with abandon (an old man is described as wearing 'old man's spectacles' and singing in an 'old man's voice'...another character has a 'characteristic' head). But despite - or as Wood shows us, because of - all this, War and Peace is, hands down, the best novel ever written.
it has a lot to do with sentences like this one, describing young Natasha Rostov's smile at the man she will eventually become engaged to, Prince Andrei, as she is swept back on to the dance-floor by another man:
that smile said: "I'd be glad to rest and sit with you; I'm tired; but you see, I've been asked to dance, and I'm glad of it, and I'm happy, and I love everybody, and you and I understand all that," and much, much more.
