Reading update!

[heliopausa]

Half-way through War and Peace, and finding it pretty fascinating - not just in itself (oh, but the flaws!) but as a major and influential nineteenth-century artefact.  That is - it's fascinating to ponder things like how this fits in with a lot of other folk-idealising nationalism (the long chapter on the wolf-hunt,and the idealised peasant-linked party which follows, for example) or how it springs from/feeds into nineteenth-century philosophical reform movements - I'm enjoying thinking about uses and influence of W&P, the artefact.

In itself, as a novel (I'm not sure right now, that something this big and philosophical should be called a novel - is there a different word I should be using? manifesto-exemplum?) it's a mess.  Especially the women "characters", who are closer to being shadow-puppets, jerked around to fit whatever point Tolstoy wants to make at any one moment, without any regard for consistency or sense. 
(Over on DW, transposable_element  pointed out the extraordinary length of one character's pregnancy; because Tolstoy wanted to fit the timing in with certain historic events, he has the gestation running on for about fifteen months.  Typical Tolstoyan oblivious shadow-puppetry.  More charitably: maybe he counted nine months from the time the pregnancy is first mentioned - but since the woman in question is already visibly pregnant at that point, and "waddling" when she moves, it's a fair bet that conception happened several months earlier.) 

But male characters can act completely arbitrarily, too, at times - and in the end, Tolstoy's got Big Things to say, and if he has to wrench the characters or the plot or medical probabilities, or even history, about to do it - well, that's the price you pay.
The Big Things are big; it wasn't just a publicity campaign which made this book stunningly influential.  There are gripping debates, and brilliant insights into some central (male) characters' minds, wonderful set-pieces (the hunt! the field hospital! even the spiteful view of high society at the opera, which is Tolstoy in very crabby Jeremiah mode) and some truly sublime moments - the twin scenes, at the ends of Volumes One and Two, in each of which a main character gazes into the sky are breathtaking. I wondered if those scenes were there as a deliberate echo of the ends of Dante's first and second parts of the Divine Comedy - something I suppose I'll find out when I read the next two volumes. 
To be continued... :)  
  

The SF classic which I was reading very late indeed was The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin,1974. I was rivetted partly by the boldness of the concept, partly by the thinking, partly by the truly engaging characters/relationships, but also very much kept enthralled just marvelling at her artistry - how on earth did she manage to keep the reader (this reader!) interested, with such a thin, dry thread of story spun around such vast ideas?
However she did it, it worked.  I was interested, or more than interested - things got so razor's-edge at one point that I had to stop reading, because I could see so clearly that disaster was about to break, and I couldn't take the tension of it all.   (I started again, after a break. :)  )   Definitely recommended, with the proviso that it's on the dryish side - more politics than pizazz.

and I've bought a heap of books, and have been reading most variously, but time in the work-day presses, so I'll post the rest of this reading update tomorrow.  :)

Comments

[edenfalling]

Oh, The Dispossessed! I adore that book. When I was nine or ten years old, I started raiding my dad's bookshelves for anything that looked vaguely interesting ('interesting' in this case defined as 'fantasy or science fiction') which meant that among other things, I read a LOT of Le Guin at a rather young age, and while I have never encountered one of her books that I disliked, the one I became passionately infatuated with was The Dispossessed. I am still passionately infatuated twenty-five years later, and I often feel I've spent most of my writing years unsuccessfully attempting to recreate some of the effects she pulled off so improbably and with such grace.

[heliopausa]

She's an extraordinary writer. For me, the book of hers which I blundered into,and which knocked me sideways, decades back, was The Left Hand of Darkness.
I'm impressed that you can even identify the effects, let alone be trying to recreate them! To me it's like conjuring; I have no idea even exactly what it is I've seen, let alone how she does it.

[conuly]

The Dispossessed is on my yearly re-read list, and not many books end up there. (I mean, I re-read lots of books every year, but I don't plan on it.)

Though I keep thinking that it would have been a very different book if she'd written it after email.

[heliopausa]

Yearly - that's a lot! Is it to see how the ideas apply/can be applied in this world,or because you love the story and the characters/relationships? (Or something else?)

:D for the email thought!

[conuly]

I just love the story. It's actually not my favorite one of hers, but I misplaced my copy of The Telling.

[heliopausa]

I've never read that! I'll keep an eye out for it.