Reading big, important books

I just finished War and Peace today; it took a couple of months, reading at a pretty leisurely pace. As I've already written, I fell in love with it from the beginning, and I didn't change my mind about it. What is amazing is that Tolstoy wrote such a beautiful, sprawling novel seemingly to illustrate his view of history and his critique of the great man theory. The Epilogue dealt mainly with his argument against the traditional view that watershed events -- particularly wars, revolutions, mass migrations -- are driven by heroes like Napoleon and Alexander -- that their will, genius, power-wielding carries the masses to do their bidding. His story, with its many characters, high and low, bad and virtuous, weak and strong, shows that this view is false; that causes and effects are impossibly complicated; that our perspectives are too limited; and it can only be the interacting masses of wills and relationships, along with a mysterious equation of constraints that he calls necessity and freedom, which actually makes "history." There is no way I can quickly boil down what he took about 1200 pages to get at and no guarantee either that I understood it perfectly as he meant it, so I'll leave it at that.

But here's one takeaway that I have from reading another of the Big Important books: it is nearly always the case that they are hyped to be much more dense, unapproachable, and difficult than they really are. Your reading pleasure will be maximized reading W&P if you are a student of history, particularly military history, but you can just as easily chuck all the theories of history and just read it as adventure and romance on a huge scale -- an epic family drama. The only difficulty is keeping the Russian names straight in the beginning, and of course the time commitment if you are a slow reader, but otherwise, it's great fun. I've had exactly the same experience with Crime and Punishment, Moby Dick, and Ulysses, all of which I approached with a sense of intimidation, but which I found to be genuinely entertaining. (Okay, there was a long bit about the sperm whale industry in MD that made me want to poke Melville with a stick, but you can skip that; no one is going to call the lit police.) I was very nearly finished with Ulysses when I finally started to get the "big picture," but there are many charms along the way, even if you suspect you're missing a lot.

You can argue all you want about the dead, white guys dominating literature for so long, but it's not just a conspiracy -- the great books are really pretty great, and you can still enjoy the wonderful diversity of contemporary fiction -- men and women, white and black, the dead and the undead (vampires have had their voices silenced for far too long).

Perhaps, I'll test my theory further one day if I ever read Finnegan's Wake, which has always looked fairly incomprehensible to me. If you've read it, let me know.

Austerlitz and after

I just finished Volume 1 and am well launched into Volume 2 of War and Peace. The last bit of V1 was Tolstoy's version of the Battle of Austerlitz. And apparently, it's not just we southern Americans who can't stop fighting wars long gone and lost. Courtesy of the BBC, the picture accompanying this post is a somewhat recent re-enactment of said battle.

I'm very taken with W&P. The characters are marvelous and, although I knew it was set during the Napoleonic wars, I don't think I realized how much of it would be based on the history of those actions. It's always interesting to figure out how writers decide where history and fiction part ways. For example, one of the "characters" is General Kutuzov -- a real person, but I'm assuming the young adjutant Prince Andrei is Tolstoy's creation. I love it. I've always been interested in the Napoleonic wars, but mainly Napoleon's dueling with Wellington, so this earlier part is educational.

I read with nerdly relish the battle scenes and try to imagine how it must have looked. I learned to love battle maps for that reason. I'm not very good with maps, but even I, after staring at them long enough, and reading the descriptions can finally begin to see how the geography shaped the action. I first had this breakthrough when reading WWII accounts of the ground war in the Philippines. Suddenly, some of what I read started to make more sense.

And speaking of maps, I like the way Tolstoy treats the drawing rooms and dining rooms of Russian society in the same way he sets the stage for the war scenes. He's always careful to say exactly where everyone is sitting or standing in relation to one another, and he tracks their movements and conversations with the same careful attention to detail. There are as many schemers, glory-seekers, and adversaries in these settings as on the fields in Austria. There's Anna Mikhailovna with the heavy artillery, Prince Vassily with the feint, and there's poor, blundering Bezukhov in full retreat. I should try to sketch one of those out! One of my favorite scenes has been the deathbed struggle over securing old Count Bezukhov's will before he finally croaks. It's deliciously funny. Well, maybe it isn't supposed to be...but it is. Thankfully, I've managed not to find out too much about this novel -- I suppose people don't find it easy to sum up such a plot and cavalcade of characters, and I've never seen the movie versions. I know Henry Fonda played Pierre Bezukhov but I'm seeing someone who looks a lot more like Oliver Platt or even P. Seymour Hoffman. He needs to be more rumpled and portly (at least, thus far).

On another track entirely, a much shorter and amusing read is John Crowley's latest blog post about his recent run-in with the law.

War and Peace 2009

I've finally decided to tackle Leo Tolstoy's classic. I read The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilyich a while back and liked them both. So, for the foreseeable future, if anyone ventures to ask me what I'm reading, then the answer is going to remain the same.

I've also just started listening to the new album (I still call it an album, even though I downloaded the MP3s from iTunes) by Kasey Chambers and her husband, Shane Nicholson, Rattlin Bones. It's one of those rare ones that you love from the first listen and every song is a keeper. Their voices are really beautiful together -- I'm a sucker for a good duet. But it's more than just duets -- it's two people really singing songs together. You don't think of Jack White and Brendan Benson doing duets, for example, or Steven Page and Ed Robertson. The collaboration is a little more involved than that -- from the songwriting to the instrumentation. Anyway, it just made my "best" list of 2008 (I think it was released in September). In no particular order, here are my other favorites from last year:

• Cardinology, Ryan Adams and the Cardinals
• Acid Tongue, Jenny Lewis and peeps
• Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
• Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket
• Consolers of the Lonely, The Raconteurs
• Angels of Destruction, Marah
• Vagabonds, Gary Louris

Coming up, I hope to see Brandi Carlile, Louris, and Adams in the next few months, and I'll keep my fingers crossed that the latest incarnation of Marah, comes around sometime this year. I just read at Kelly Willis' site that after a few April shows, she is on extended hiatus from the road, having found that four small children and a tour bus don't really mix. I can't imagine how it could, since her husband is also a musician.