The world that narrates itself

• James Wood on the new Pevear/Volokhonsky War and Peace in The New Yorker.
  

Readers always feel that Tolstoy is both an intrusive narrator—breaking in to explain things, telling us what to think, writing essays and sermons—and a miraculously absent one, who simply lets his world narrate itself. As Isaac Babel put it, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” There is a sense in which Tolstoy is saying to us—to dare a Tolstoyan reading of Tolstoy, for a minute—“I will gladly help you read Natasha’s or Pierre’s or the little princess’s face, but, really, anyone could do it. You don’t need me. For these are the largest, most universal, most natural emotions, not the precious little sweets of the stylish novelist.” The old prince, ignoring his son Andrei’s efforts to tell him about Napoleon’s designs, breaks into croaky song, and sings “in an old man’s off-key voice.” A few pages later, we see “the old prince in his old man’s spectacles and his white smock.” An old man with an old man’s voice and old man’s spectacles: Tolstoy pushes such characterization toward the simplest tautology: What was the old man like? He was like an old man—that is to say, like all old men. What is a young man like? He is like a young man—that is to say, like all young men. What is a happy young woman like? Like all happy young women. The Austrian minister of war is described thus: “He had an intelligent and characteristic head.” A character will tend to look characteristic in both senses of the word: full of character, and somehow typical.

There is a powerful tension in Tolstoy’s work between persons and types, the particular and the general, freedom and laws. The quintessential Tolstoyan atmosphere is one in which highly particularized characters, with their hairy fingers and short lips, experience universal emotions that might easily be transferred from one character to another. This is why the minor characters are as alive as the major ones. In the novel’s epilogue, Nikolai Rostov’s aged mother, the Countess, hears the conversation around her and suddenly perks up. She had finished her tea, Tolstoy writes, “and clearly wished to find a pretext for getting angry after eating.” Now, that is a very Tolstoyan observation, but it is not unique to the Countess. Almost anyone of a certain age in this novel might have felt the same way. (Chekhov, who learned so much from Tolstoy, is comparably subtle, but without the urge to generalize.)

A fresh look at Tolstoy

• Michael Dirda reviews Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace in The Washington Post.

At some point in their lives, Some day, nearly all serious readers say to themselves, I really should sit down and start War and Peace. For many of us, though, that day never quite comes. After all, the book is enormously long: Some editions take up two, three or even four volumes. Those confined to one, like this new Knopf translation, possess the heft and appearance of small cinder blocks: With the right mortar, you could lay foundations with them. What's more, the book's extensive action embraces multiple storylines, three generations, and half of Europe; and, as the pages mount up, Tolstoy repeatedly theorizes at tedious length about the nature of history. Even the characters names can be confusing--at one point a man named Kuragin courts a young woman named Karagin. Still, for many readers the book's most off-putting element is probably its reputation: It's not just a novel, it's, well, it's . . . War and Peace.

But a fine new translation, especially one by the widely acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh, to approach it not as a monument (or mausoleum) but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts. Stressing that their War and Peace sticks more closely to the Russian text than any other, including Louise and Aylmer Maude's semi-canonical 1923 version, Pevear and Volokhonsky retain the considerable amount of French used by Tolstoy's counts and princesses, preserve the author's penchant for word repetition and aim to match his tidy syntactic conciseness. The result certainly reads smoothly, its English being neither egregiously contemporary nor inappropriately old-fashioned. In this respect, the Pevear-Volokhonsky War and Peace joins company with recent translations of The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote and In Search of Lost Time, these being among the few works of classic fiction equal to Tolstoy's in scope and richness. Given so capacious and generous a masterpiece, it's simply impossible to do more than offer -- with due humility at how much is being overlooked -- a few introductory propositions for the would-be reader.

The Tolstoy highlight reel

• Newly unearthed: Tolstoy's first draft of War and Peace, 600 pages shorter and with a different ending.

I don't think this is heresy or anything -- the complete version stands a good chance of sticking around. This edition will be an interesting read, but a first draft is still a first draft...

What is being billed as Tolstoy's "original version" is to be published - some 600 pages lighter, with the removal of Tolstoy's philosophical musings and the prospect of a happy ending. Not everyone, however, is pleased. Academics fear many will be tempted to settle for what they regard as an unfinished version.

The new book was the life's work of Russian scholar Evelina Zaidenshnur, who for 50 years pored over thousands of pages to assemble Tolstoy's first draft, matching different inks, changes in handwriting and types of paper to piece together the author's earliest version.

That work, originally intended for circulation among fellow scholars, is to be published by Fourth Estate in April in an English translation by Andrew Bromfield. War and Peace: The Original Version, weighs in at a relatively svelte 900 pages.

Indie booksellers, rest in peace

• Tyler Cowen thinks the loss of the independent bookstore is no big deal at Slate.

Alas, much of this piece is spot-on, even though it stings to admit it:

The real change in the book market is not the big guy vs. the little guy, or chain vs. indie stores. Rather, it's the reader's greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude. In the modern world we are more pressed for time, and we face a greater diversity of cultural choices. It was easy to finish Tolstoy's War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the "Alchian and Allen theorem." Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts.

This and other corresponding stories were brought on by the news of the closing of Cody's, a venerable independent bookstore located in San Francisco. The nice thing about independently-owned and operated stores is, yes, having a personal contact at a brick-and-mortar establishment who knows a thing or two about what the store sells and can point inquisitive customers in the right direction, or, alternatively, turn them on to something they might not have thought about or heard of before.

Given the advent of the Internet, however, specialized knowledge of literature -- and books, in general -- has become almost a moot point. Word-of-mouth is one of the strongest selling points of any book, simply because it depends largely upon an interpersonal recommendation: when someone whose tastes you respect mentions a book in a positive context, you're more likely to seek it out. Cowen is smart to point out that forums on the Net -- reader reviews at Amazon, for example, as well as litblogs -- have taken this idea into a new medium. If someone over at Bookslut or Conversational Reading can make a good case for reading XY's new book, then, well, why not check it out?

Yes, e-commerce will probably be the death of the traditional independent bookstore. I'm probably like most people who like to read: my budget is limited, so I'm more likely to buy used books, or shop online for the discounts. It's extremely rare for me to pay full cover price for a book I'm looking for, be it at an independent OR chain bookstore, simply because it doesn't make a whole lot of fiscal sense to do so. It would seem, then, that the alternative to putting more money in the pockets of the behemoths is to apply the same philosophy that spurs you to shop outside the mainstream to e-commerce, as well: buying books from individuals on Amazon Marketplace or eBay, or shopping at independent online booksellers like Powells or discount retailers like BookCloseouts.com.

Cowen is right: there's more out there now, meaning more avenues to explore and about a fraction of the time to explore them. Specialized knowledge of books and literature could either become a blessing or a liability; there was a widely-circulated piece in the May 14 New York Times Magazine called "Scan This Book!", by Kevin Kelly, a writer for Wired, that suggested the future of books would be not unlike that of an MP3 playlist. Knowledge of books, Kelly suggested, would become highly compartmentalized; subject matter could be cross-indexed to death, which is fine if you're looking for scads of information on one particular topic but, as Scott Esposito pointed out, could have the backlash effect of reducing the scope and vision of a particular book to a mere collection of loosely-associated parts. Probably the most appealing thing about a well-written book of any type is its potential to compress the world in all its contradictory glory between two cardboard covers; to contain multitudes. In a world driven and governed by soundbites, that's harder and harder to accomplish.

The problem with Proust (and Tolstoy too)

• Salon's "Summer School" series wraps up with Jane Smiley's take on In Search of Lost Time.

I don't know what it is about Proust and Tolstoy, but they make other writers lose their minds, either out of exasperation or jealousy (probably a combination of both). Proust's digressive style, packed with sentences that loop and curl and flow and never quit, seems like it does something to people with an interest in, and love of, language. It's like they put down Swann's Way and run straight to the keyboard to write about what they've just experienced, to hammer out an explorative essay about Proust's style/themes/whatever, just to hang on to that feeling. It's next to impossible to recommend Proust to anyone because you have to preface your recommendation with something along the lines of, "Well, he's not really a storyteller per se, but he's an amazing writer," which makes most people's eyes roll back into their heads before the sentence has even left your tongue. Nonetheless, he's worth your time. (I've heard it said that Proust can't be truly appreciated unless you read the original French, but if you're an ignorant monoglot Yank like me, a halfway decent translation is about all you can hope for.)

• Orlando Figes gets a lot right about War and Peace at the Times Online.

Tolstoy is a similar matter, despite the fact that War and Peace is hardly the unwieldly behemoth it's at times made out to be. A high-concept, fast-food culture like ours doesn't know what to do with a novel that's 1500 pages long and appears not to have any one central character or storyline. And yet you pick up the thing and grimace at the weight and tell yourself, well, if it's a drag, then I'll try again in another decade or so, and before you know it Tolstoy's hooked you, the bastard, and you find yourself awake at 3am, ink-stained thumbs sore from flipping pages, screaming, "What's gonna happen to Natasha?!?" The many characters are vivid and memorable, the philosophical ideology of fate is endlessly fruitful and the dissection of the chaos and calamity of warfare is enlightening (particularly these days). Filter out all those scholarly exhorations and you're still left with a ripping good story, told with incredible clarity and confidence and nary a dull moment. When you do, in fact, put it down, you feel like you've just been reintroduced to the world.