Monday, November 15, 2010
Other Tolstoy?
Have you read anything else by Tolstoy? I read "Anna Karenina" a long time ago. I remember liking it. My volume containing "Hadji Murad" has a bunch of Tolstoy's other short fiction, so I started reading "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," which is fascinating. This might be the momentum I need to finally tackle "War and Peace."
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I also read "Anna Karenina" several years ago and really liked it. I think I would have gotten more out of it if I'd had a book club to discuss it with. It's so long and dense. I think I'd probably like "War and Peace," too, if I worked up the courage. Hehe
ReplyDeleteI lack the fortitude for "War and Peace," I think. It will browbeat me into admissions of laziness, just like my nemesis, "Don Quixote."
ReplyDeleteBut the writing was lovely. The thistle metaphor at the start and end, especially.
I read "Ivan Ilyich" in college and loved it, about a life in pursuit of material things and the empty payoff.
I kept thinking Tolstoy's thistle line at the end reminded me of something, and today I thought of it: Homer. And Homer's melancholy matter-of-factness.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of The Iliad, there's that brief graceful line, written by a narrator looking back.
That was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses.
And in Tolstoy, it's:
This was the death I was reminded of by the crushed thistle in the plowed field.
The simplicity of the final words, capping something so mythic and complex, is breath-taking.