Book Meme, Day 12

[selenak]

12. I pretend to have read it.

War and Peace, occassionally. I'm shamefully ignorant (in the sense of actually having read the books, as opposed to general cultural osmosis) of the Russian classics anyway, and for some reason, I never got around to War and Peace. I did see both the Hollywood and the more recent tv series version, but it's definitely on my "must read before I die" list.





1. Favorite book from childhood
2. Best Bargain
3. One with a blue cover.
4. Least favorite book by favorite author
5. Doesn't belong to me.
6. The one I always give as a gift.
7. Forgot I owned it.
8. Have more than one copy.
9. Film or tv tie-in.
10. Reminds me of someone I love.
11. Second hand bookshop gem.

13. Makes me laugh.
14. An old favorite.
15. Favorite fictional father.
16. Can't believe more people haven't read.
17. Future classic.
18. Bought on a recommendation.
19. Still can't stop talking about it.
20. Favorite cover.
21. Summer read.
22. Out of print.
23. Made to read at school.
24. Hooked me into reading.
25. Never finished it.
26. Should have sold more copies.
27. Want to be one of the characters.
28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.
29. The one I have reread most often.
30. Would save if my house burned down.

Comments

[kore]

I finally did read and loved Anna Karenina, and want to read it sometime soon again, but W&P has defeated me every single time. I am starting to think it's like Moby-Dick and its reputation is bloated out of all proportion to how good it actually is. I think it gets a reputation as World's Best Novel because it's supposed to be about, well, War and Manly Things. Altho (heresy I know) I like Tolstoy's novellas better, except for Anna K., I think he writes better at a shorter length. I dunno if he got that habit of inserting nonfiction essays into the story from Hugo or Hugo got it from him (or did they get it from Zola?), but someone should have stopped both of them.

(I'm always reminded of that Delany snipe at The Dispossessed that 'To be an American intellectual of a certain (pre-Magershack) age is to have read more English prose by Constance Garnett than probably any other single English writer except Dickens.' As if Magershack didn't have his own problems, but anyway.)

[vaznetti]

I am the opposite, in that I've bounced off Anna Karenina more than once -- the the point that it's no longer on my list -- but really enjoyed War & Peace when I read it, over a week's holiday at the beach. It has got a lot of nonfiction essays in it but I enjoy that kind of thing, and I should probably admit that I read large chunks of Gibbon in the same way in another year, so it may be that the problem is actually with my taste.

[selenak]

I dunno if he got that habit of inserting nonfiction essays into the story from Hugo or Hugo got it from him (or did they get it from Zola?), but someone should have stopped both of them.

Zola's younger than Hugo, surely? (Since Hugo = Romantic Age, Zola = Realism/Naturalism in my long ago literary history.) So blaming Victor H. strikes me as more plausible. :)

[kore]

OMG. //looks them up

Zola 2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902

Hugo 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885

//FACEPALM

I blame E.M. Forster ("Time, all the way through, is to be our enemy. We are to visualize the great novelists not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room — all writing their novels simultaneously").

[selenak]

He. :) Well, technically, Hugo was still writing when Zola wrote, they definitely overlap, due to Hugo getting very old. And hey, they're buried next to each other (and with Alexandre Dumas, which is very fitting since he and Hugo were the French Romantics) in the Pantheon.

Also, that's a beautiful Forster quote.

[kore]

And hey, they're buried next to each other (and with Alexandre Dumas, which is very fitting since he and Hugo were the French Romantics) in the Pantheon.

Aww! What midnight conversations they could have.

Isn't it great? I think of it often when I look at my shelves (which are organized by size and "how much can I cram in this space," so there are lots of odd juxtapositions).

[selenak]

I bet the first thing Dumas wants to know is whether Zola was murdered or not, and to construct a mighty revenge plot if he was. Hugo is torn. Zola is zen until finding out that bastard Henri Rochefort claimed Zola had discovered Dreyfus was guilty after all and committed suicide. Then Zola gives Dumas permission to construct as grandiose a revenge plot as he can come up with.

[kore]

Zola is zen until finding out that bastard Henri Rochefort claimed Zola had discovered Dreyfus was guilty after all and committed suicide.

Wait WTF??? D:

Then Zola gives Dumas permission to construct as grandiose a revenge plot as he can come up with.

THAT WOULD BE EPIC.

[selenak]

To quote wiki about Zola's death:

"Zola died on 29 September 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by an improperly ventilated chimney.[13] His funeral on 5 October was attended by thousands. Alfred Dreyfus initially had promised not to attend the funeral but was given permission by Mme Zola and attended.[14][15]

His enemies were blamed for his death because of previous attempts on his life, but nothing could be proved at the time. Expressions of sympathy arrived from everywhere in France; for a week the vestibule of his house was crowded with notable writers, scientists, artists, and politicians who came to inscribe their names in the registers.[citation needed] On the other hand, Zola's enemies used the opportunity to celebrate in malicious glee.[16] Writing in L'Intransigeant, Henri Rochefort claimed Zola had committed suicide, having discovered Dreyfus to be guilty.

Zola was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, but on 4 June 1908, just five years and nine months after his death, his remains were relocated to the Panthéon, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.[17] The ceremony was disrupted by an assassination attempt by Louis-Anthelme Grégori, a disgruntled journalist and admirer of Edouard Drumont, on Alfred Dreyfus, who was wounded in the arm by the gunshot. Grégori was acquitted by the Parisian court which accepted his defense that he had not meant to kill Dreyfus, meaning merely to graze him.

In 1953, an investigation ("Zola a-t-il été assassiné?") published by the journalist Jean Borel in the newspaper Libération raises the idea that Zola's death might have been a murder rather than an accident.[18] It is based on the revelation of the Norman pharmacist Pierre Hacquin, who was told by the chimney sweeper Henri Buronfosse that the latter intentionally blocked the chimney of Zola's apartment in Paris ("Hacquin, je vais vous dire comment Zola est mort. [...] Zola a été asphyxié volontairement. C'est nous qui avons bouché la cheminée de son appartement.")."

Clearly, if ever something called for a Dumas plot...

[kore]

WOW

Also, I was just reading a new book on Wilde which said that after conversations with Esterhazy? that Carlos Blacker dropped a vital clue to Wilde who told Zola, altho apparently it's still murky what actually happened (and Google tells me scholars have been going on about this new wrinkle since at least 2010). I had totally forgotten Wilde arrived in Paris right as Zola's trial was raging.

Also now I want this: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660827.001.0001/acprof-9780199660827

[selenak]

*googles*

Good lord. I must say Wilde doesn't come out of this looking very well, according to this review. Siding with Esterhazy and the Anti-Dreyfus-Crowd?

[kore]

Yeah, the new book (Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years) quotes him as going on about how he and Esterhazy were both criminals and being epigrammatic about innocence and so on. Gah. But, it also suggests, on the basis of his contemporary letters to Blacker and Constance Wilde, that Wilde promised to tell Blacker what Esterhazy had said at dinner, and that he was probably drunk when he told Strong about Blacker's information from Panizzardi about the exculpatory evidence. And this author also points out that Chris Healy, who was "a Dreyfusard," was with Strong and Wilde and took the news to Zola and later said Wilde "suggested the clue which enabled Zola to successfully defend Dreyfus," and another friend of Zola's probably wrote the article which appeared in the French press days before Strong's article. And Blacker came at once when Wilde got news Constance was dead, and helped him very generously with money. -- Not that any of that excuses Wilde's behaviour or things he said, but it does suggest the situation is a little more complex. At the very least if Wilde hadn't told the secret to Strong and Healy, Lettre d’un Diplomate might never even have been written, which makes me kind of dizzy.

[kore]

But it certainly is very disappointing on Wilde's part, yeah. I think it was one of those times when his aesthetics got the better of his ethics and he tossed off stuff like 'to be innocent requires no imagination' or whatever, plus he was thinking of himself as a criminal too. Plus there was a v weird anti-Dreyfus anglophobia in France at the time? WTF.

Poor Carlos, he was the best man at Wilde's wedding and I just read in a book review how he requested his ashes be put in the tomb next to Wilde's, altho it was put much more affectingly than that and of course now I can't find it. (Altho then his son Carlos Paton Blacker was a eugenicist? DD: But his granddaughter was a 'Blakean' batik atist! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/thetis-blacker-434360.html)

[wendelah1]

I read War and Peace and Anna Karenina when I was in my late twenties, if I recall. I remember loving them both, though the latter a bit more.

[moon_custafer]

I read W&P a couple of years ago. My summary – first half is dull; second half is pretty good as all the plots that were set up in the first half start to pay off; epilogue made me feel betrayed – everyone loses pretty much all their character development and the women in particular either turn into sitcom housewives or martyred doormats (or both). Also, that artillery officer/ballistics geek who lost an arm kind of disappeared from the story at one point and I don’t think we ever found out what happened to him, which is a pity because I liked him.

[selenak]

An epilogue which betrays? That is not good news. :(

[kalypso]

I reread War and Peace a year or so back, after the last TV version, and really meant to write a blog-post about it, but I hardly ever post here any more (and excuse myself by muttering that the more hours I put into crafting a post the less response it gets, though that's unfair when I barely read or respond to other people now).

Anyway, a few random snippets from what I would have said (may be some spoilers but I imagine you know a lot of the plot anyway):

Gosh, I wish I could have edited this. He has a very repetitive style and I could sub a lot of the repetition out.

Someone else: I expect you'd have cut the battle scenes.
Me: NO! The battle scenes are so much more interesting in the book than on screen. On screen it's just lots of people rushing round while things explode, and you've no idea what's going on, which is probably what it's like on a battlefield but rather dull when you're not in danger yourself. In the book, you're usually approaching the battle from the PoV of Andrei, who's an officer with a keen interest in military strategy, so you know what's at stake in this battle, what the plan is, and how exactly the plan degenerates into a chaotic mess.

Andrew Davies, you cad! Prince Vasily did do right by Boris Drubetskoy, reluctantly obliged by his sense of duty.

Andrew Davies, are you on some kind of anti-Bechdel mission? In the book, Natasha and Sonya hold conversations which are not about men they might marry. In particular, when Andrei overhears Natasha luxuriating in a summer night and fantasising about flying out of her window, he is rather disappointed to hear that the young ladies of the house are not talking about him.

And though Andrei has a sense of rejuvenation after seeing Natasha for the first time, on her father's country estate, rather than thinking "Gosh, I might marry that girl", he's inspired to return to Moscow and volunteer for a committee on military reform.

Ooh, Natasha has synaesthesia!

Tolstoy forgets things about his characters - I was startled by the initial description of Countess Rostova as a woman whose health has been wrecked by frequent pregnancies (and the fact that she must have lost several children, comparing the number of pregnancies with the number of children we meet), but much later on he describes her as having maintained her strength and looks until [shattering event].

It's a shame to cut out Vera Rostova; she's not a very interesting person in herself, but the scene in which her father is totally outmanoeuvred over her marriage is a telling stage in the decline of the Rostovs.

Helene keeps being described as very stupid, and aristocratic society as deluded in thinking her clever, but the one time we get into her PoV she is handling her options skilfully.

OK, Lev, I've got the point about Napoleon not driving history by now.

Of all the dramatisations I've seen or heard - I imprinted on the BBC 26-part TV marathon in 1972, but now I think that Radio Four version a couple of years ago, with Paterson Joseph as Pierre, does it best.

Directors can't resist Pierre, Karatayev and the rest trudging through the snow, but actually the snow hits the retreat after Pierre is rescued.

Everyone hates the final glimpse of the families, but I rather like the way the marriages are OK but flawed (a husband's temper, a wife's jealousy).


Maybe, having written that, I could work it up into a post after all.

[vilakins]

I've read it twice! It's actually very entertaining and occasionally witty.

[selenak]

So noted. I will read it one day, I swear!

[vilakins]

I suppose I'm in practice. Some SF&F books are ridiculously long, and that's not counting the seemingly interminable series a lot of authors seem to go for now.

Sweet icon!