About War and Peace

War and Peace is like a vast inland sea. It's huge; there's so much room to swim around in; you can't see the other side; you can't even see the middle from the shore.

One of the great characters of the book is General Kutuzov, the real-life general who was commander-in chief of the Russian army against Napoleon in 1812. Kutuzov retreated and allowed Napoleon to occupy Moscow, much to the disgust of other ambitious generals, and to the Russian emperor's court who were holed up in Petersburg. Tolstoy admired Kutuzov and spends many pages defending his actions which saved Russia and caused the French to lose their whole army in the long run. Tolstoy contrasts Kutuzov with Napoleon in his discussion about the 'great man' which is a major idea in the book - an idea he 'essays' upon rather than 'novelises' about, hence the debate on whether W & P is really a novel.

Be that as it may, now that I'm out of the sea of W & P, I've been splashing around with my usual magazine reading (fifteen minute swots while I'm waiting for the spuds to cook) and found in the latest Vanity Fair an article about Vladimir Putin. It's all about what a mysterious and possibly sinister figure he is, but I was struck by the prosaic fact of how he gets to work. He drives, actually he's driven in impressive style, along the Kutuzovsky Prospect. Hey, I know what that street's about! I've read War and Peace!

Yes, this is highly digressive, but the point I want to make is how often a really good book can illuminate landscapes for the reader. Writing inscribes all sorts of meanings onto the landscape and, for me, it's one of the chief joys of reading.

I'm about to take off for a short trip into the backblocks of NSW. No particular destination in mind, but I'm wondering what kind of writing I'll find attached to NSW country towns? Bush ballads, tales of wandering poets, grim stories of massacres, heroic stories of settlement? What's out there?

Reading

How do you like to read? I'd love to hear how different people go about their reading lives.

For the last ten days or so my main activity and preoccupation has been reading War and Peace, the great Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy. It became the centrepiece of my days; it dominated my thoughts, dreams and moods. I first read it many years ago in an old Penguin edition but recently a friend loaned me a new translation of the work which came out in 2007. Published by Viking, this edition is translated, introduced and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The book is long, more than 1200 big pages. Except for the last section of the Epilogue, I found it a thrilling and profound page-turner.

I feel its effect is still filtering down into my mind. I want to think about it more before I say too much about it. One thing's for sure though: it's put me off all other novels for the time being at least. (That's not counting the odd bit of crime fiction which I put into another category.)

Tolstoy has blown away the cute little plan I had going for reading books on the Man Booker Prize list. I'd managed to reserve the Booker Prize books from my local libraries but when I went to collect them I just couldn't face them any more. I'll read a thousand pages of Tolstoy with glee but please, don't ask me to read a big modern door stopper - not now, not any more.

Novels were once considered dangerous, immoral, a device of the devil and there's still a touch of that around in the sense that reading a novel all day, day in and day out, week in and week out, is regarded as being idle, being lazy, doing nothing. When, as we all know, wisdom and moral strength is found in being busy (but not busy reading novels). Yet for me the best way to read is to go about it seriously, get right into the book and make it the centre of daily life. This also goes for non-fiction reading.