Celebrating completion of reading a "famously difficult" novel

Yesterday I finished reading Russian author and philosopher Leo Tolstoy's historical fiction novel, "War and Peace", which was first recommended to me several years ago by a Maldivian guitarist friend, who is several years younger than me, who told me, "it's long but good".

Fast-forward to February when one of my good friends and former Advanced Level English literature classmate from Science Education Centre (SEC) - now Centre for Higher Secondary Education (CHSE) - who lives in Malaysia wanted to gift me a second book (the first one being "Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence" authored by Alessandra Viola and Stefano Mancuso).

I thought long and hard and wondered whether I should give her my current Top 5 list of books I want which contains:

1) James Jones - "The Thin Red Line"

2) Mark Bowden - "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War"

3) Ken Follett - "The Pillars of the Earth"

4) Nihal De Silva - "The Road from Elephant Pass"

5) Shehan Karunatilaka - "Chinaman"

I thought of giving her this list because she would then find it convenient to settle on a choice of a book she can easily find. But just in case "War and Peace" was easily available to her, I didn't send this list, and asked her to check whether it was possible for her to get "War and Peace".

I felt I had been delaying reading this book for far too long, and I was right: another friend, a History classmate, recommended it as a "classic" and when I Googled what critics had to say, they described it as "one of the world's greatest literary works" even if some readers describe it as a "famously difficult" novel.

It may be unfair of me to compare Tolstoy with Jane Austen but one thing I found in common was both of them used long sentences that sometimes amounted to paragraphs. Yes, you can extend a sentence by inserting semi colons to detail descriptions as much as you like. When I read Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", there were instances where, when I came to the end of a sentence, I forgot what she had said in the beginning of that sentence! Blame it on me because English is not my native language.

And blame it on English being not my mother tongue for not me understanding many of Tolstoy's sentences which were organized and arranged in such a way that it took multiple readings for them to make sense to me and a lot of the time didn't make sense to me at all.

But a friend of mine is of the view that English doesn't necessarily have to be my first language in order to understand material written in English: he says that with "proper training", (more English language and literature classes?) I can very well understand Russian literature such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment", which, surprisingly, even without any such training I managed to sail through easily.

You might say my failure to fully appreciate "War and Peace" was because I was reading an English translation of the book, which was originally written in Russian, but my understanding is that works that are translated remain, more or less, true to the original language they were written in.

So don't be surprised that it took me about 3 months to finish reading "War and Peace" which has more than half a million words (587,287 words to be exact) in 1,200 pages! (I can read a Hardy Boys book in less than 4 hours but that's because it's written in really simple English and not exceeding 150 pages).

I once blogged that I am 47 years old and that life is now becoming short for me and that, therefore, I do not want to waste the little time I have left in struggling through cultural productions which I find not worth my time when there are so many good works out there which I cannot hope to cover in this one lifetime.

Hence, one of my friends asked me why I was torturing myself with Tolstoy rather than like the time I gave up reading Frank Herbert's "Dune" which I quit reading after around 200 pages. The truth about abandoning "Dune" was because I had already watched David Lynch's film based on it and I didn't like the story.

"Dune" is the only cultural production I ever unwillingly gave up without finishing - reluctantly because there is also the reason that it might become a bad habit of me quitting every time a challenging cultural production came my way.

In truth, I like challenges, with also taking into consideration that a cultural production (such as a book, film, etc.) might appear bad or boring at the onset, but prove to be a rewarding experience once I struggle and complete going through it.

There are exceptions of course which quite regrettably left me feeling I had wasted my precious time. One of such recent works include the Telugu language movie "RRR" from India which, while having excellent production design and visual effects, was a great disappointment even upon a 2nd viewing. I should have realized that it had no redeeming qualities from the moment I saw one of the actors punch a tiger in the face! Perhaps "RRR" belongs to the "fantasy" genre as its producers claim.

Why I wanted to complete reading "War and Peace" was because Tolstoy, being the philosopher he was, incorporated a lot of his philosophies into the narrative, and according to those who had read the book, Tolstoy's philosophies were unmissable and worth reading - not to mention that his genre is "realism".

If there is any "problem" with the book, it's just the way he has structured the novel: he uses hundreds of pages just introducing and detailing a lot of characters and it's only after around 800 pages that he starts linking all the convoluted characters into a single social network. It's also around that time he starts to discuss in depth the war between France and Russia. You can imagine how frustrated I will be reading those initial hundreds of pages without being able to make sense of anything although, because I had read about the book on the Internet, I knew it will go somewhere but was too impatient to get there.

The webpage TolstoyTherapy.com describes "War and Peace" as "one of the best books ever written" and says that literary greats such as Nabokov and Proust describes Tolstoy as a "favorite author".

"The characters are never static, but constantly developing. We see how they grow and change because of events, feelings, and other characters. Tolstoy manages to put everything into the grander scheme of things, and you find yourself appreciating life rather than worrying without reason," writes the webpage's author Lucy Fuggle, in an article titled, "Why read 'War and Peace'? The reasons why I love Tolstoy's masterpiece".

Lucy goes on to say that on her 2nd reading, it took her 12 days to finish. I am not surprised that a 2nd reading can be undertaken in such a short period of time because the reader would already know what to expect - unlike me who was bored to death and sometimes had to read a paragraph quite a few times because I kept dozing off from what, during the initial parts of the book, appeared to me as unnecessary details. A friend, however, sarcastically said that anything which puts a person to sleep is to be commended! "Only a work of genius can help you relax," he opined ironically.

My verdict on "War and Peace" is similar to my verdict on "Avatar: The Way of Water": that is, from a professional and objective view, I can recognize the book's finesse although it's not my cup of tea. Hence, even though I am not the audience of "War and Peace", it will definitely resonate with its target audience - such as the many Lucys out there.

Because Tolstoy is regarded as "one of the greatest authors of all time" and was nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and Nobel Prize in Literature as well, I plan to read more of his books, however challenging those are, and my next stop is "Anna Karenina", which I have already procured from BookDepository.com: it is described by some literary critics as "one of the best novels ever written" and also as "one of the best love stories ever told"; Tolstoy calls it his "first true novel".

I shall conclude this blogpost with a most interesting quote by Tolstoy I found from "War and Peace" which is: "All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom".