Since we're actually up to posting about a book or so a week now, I thought I'd return this feature to its original name, Book of the Week. For my hundredth post here, I'm going to discuss and recommend the greatest work of epic fiction I'm likely to read in my life (which does not mean it's my favorite novel — another Russian wrote that), Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.

NOOOOO!!!

I write about this warhorse of the college readling lists because: a) I'm currently reading it; and b) I think it has an appeal to those who read the sort of genre fiction I read for recreation, meaning fantasy and science fiction novels of an epic cast, such as The Lord Of The Rings or Dune. I know what sends traffic to this blog. I know who you are, and I know what you read. You are my people.

I'll start my recommendation by stating what War and Peace isn't. It is not boring. It is not difficult to read in a good translation (more on that below). It is not, I'm sorry to tell someone whose reading I follow, a romance novel.

What War and Peace is, is the story of the last generation in pre-modern Russia, caught up in the largest war ever fought, of which Napoleon's invasion of Russia was only the decisive part. It's a generational story, dealing with the lives of and the war's effects on very human characters drawn from the upper reaches of their society, some heroic, some intellectual, and some just ordinary people. Where Tolstoy shines is in bringing his characters (of whom there are hundreds though in the end only about eight of them are central to the story) to as full a life as we're going to find on the printed page. Though it's exciting to read about an Aragorn or a Paul Atreides, at the end of their respective books you don't feel as though you know them. You will feel that you know Prince Andrei, the heroic equivalent in Tolstoy's work, by the time you turn the last page.

And yet War and Peace isn't some Faulknerian drudge's chore of interior monologue. It is an epic, which is not the same as long. The novel contains some of the best passages on war and battle ever written, in a conflict that really mattered and decided in large part the way the world is shaped today. As an officer in the Crimean War, Tolstoy knew what war is, recognizing and conveying the glory and the horror, often at the same time. Those who enjoy, for instance, the work of Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down), will be right at home here.

War and Peace is also a novel of ideas. Tolstoy, writing fifty years after the events recorded had changed Russia and the world forever, appreciated the appeal of revolution and empire, personified in Napoleon, but was personally sympathetic to the older, pre-modern ways the war destroyed. That sympathy was such that in later years he shut himself off from the world and tried to live as a Christian mystic on a peasant commune, but the man writing this work had his feet in both worlds, and conveys the appeal of each.

Now I'll take back what I wrote above. War and Peace is also a domestic novel, and it is a romance. Between the punctuations of the Napoleonic wars, there are passages conveying the lives of families, courtship, and love. But the most romantic relationships aren't the ones that endure. I first read this novel at the age of twenty, and didn't appreciate the honesty with which Tolstoy conveys marriage and family life, having only experienced my own nuclear family. At forty, having been out in the world and married myself, I do appreciate it.

Finally, War and Peace is a long novel, in the best sense. It will take you through every turn in the lives of Tolstoy's characters, over a generation. You will get to know them, and yet, at the end as with the best epic novels, you'll regret having to leave them behind. And you'll regret having to leave Tolstoy's Russia behind, a time and place that he brings to life even for people who will never visit the country. Specialists in the art of the long novel which conveys a place, such as Margaret Mitchell and James Michener, may have aped Tolstoy, but they rarely approached him.

If you can get through the first hundred pages, the most daunting task in approaching this beast, you will finish War and Peace, and you will not regret it.

If you're interested, the novel is available in several translations, and translation matters. Russian is a difficult language to translate, full of idiom that makes no sense when approached literally, but yet Tolstoy has a unique style that a good translator will preserve. I haven't skimmed every translation, but I can recommend Anne Dunnigan's translation for Signet Classics, which hits the mark in well written English. It's out of print but you can find it in any used bookstore, or for that matter you can buy it for 38 cents on Amazon right now.

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