The Waffle Iron

War and Sleaze

After over seven months of dog-earing and shifting my book-mark between the yellowed pages of a Penguin Classics 1984 edition of a fourteen hundred and fifty paged book titled "War and Peace", I finally closed the book for the last time with a grim feeling of dissatisfaction at the dissipated state of changed times. While this epic (written in the late 1860s) by Count Leo Tolstoy still mirrors human spirit and mourns the futility of wars, you can't help but ruminate upon the different state of affairs that invading/invaded countries now find themselves after the horrors of a war. What should normally be termed 'peace' (if ever there was), now occupies newspaper and tabloid front-pages as 'sleaze'. However, I don't consider myself qualified to decry decisions that those in power deem insurmountable or to deplore the hero-worshipping of those who strategise the mass butchering of a body of the army, the victory or loss of which represents the triumph or humiliation of the people of the nation that they had chosen to represent.

I had intially ventured upon writing (or rather, typing) my interpretation of this HUGE book that I read intermittently between periods of frenetic activity (read: last minute photo-copying of notes before semester exams) and blissful idleness (read: the last few weeks). So here I go...

The sole aspect of reading a Russian book which narrates the circumstances that Russian life was, in the early 1800s, is the names - yeah, proper nouns!! While I struggled to disentangle myself from the webs of Bezuhovs, Rostovs, Drubetskoys, Bolkonskys, Kuragins, Alexeyivichs and Vereshchagins; I tried to hold on desperately to the triflings at the battles of Borodino, Smolensk and God-only-remembers-where-else. Despite the despair that seizes you, when Tolstoy slips into Books, Parts and Chapters of trying to unravel those skeins of thought that each of the priciple characters inevitably draw themselves into; there's a well arranged train of logic and an artfully contrived jigsaw of colourful cameos that throw you into contemplation. You could have convulsions of grief/joy/wonder/awe/boredom through the pages in which he (Tolstoy) rails at French 'historians' who deify the quite ordinary Napoleon Bonaparte as a 'genius' and Russian writers who claim that Alexander I was a monarch of the subtlest virtues and the paradigm of magnanimity (while he seemed to me like a puffed-up schmuck of the first order). The minute inspection of lives and circumstances is justified by the idea that a macro phenomenon like a war between nations is an integral of the infinitesimals (which are the unconscious actions of individuals who are otherwise termed inconsequential). The famous Epilogue is like a homily, pages of 'Freewill Vs Necessity'!! And, I must admit, I was more occupied with the odd mosquito buzzing at my ear and the discoloured lizard that seemed ready to leap from the ceiling, when I forced myself to undergo the agony of savouring all those grande ideas.
I did find some similarities though, between this one and my OTHER favourite book (Gone With The Wind) - copious explanations about the movements of the left flank of 'our' army and the ruination that would await the middle column, or the burning of cities and entire towns and the impoverishment of wealthy, but squandering families. The most striking one, however, is that not-so-rare state of uncertainty that most stories make their (so far) patient readers suffer in. While Scarlett announces that "Tomorrow is another day"; the young, impressionable and orphaned Nikolai Bolkonsky decides to do whatever his beloved uncle Pierre considered right (which suggests his involvement in the formation of a secret, anarchist organisation) at the fag-end of this wonderful story when you thought a Sleeping Beauty - style '...And they live happily ever after' ending would leave you in raptures of joy. It leaves you with that disconcerting sense of intrigue that tears your mind apart, while you mull over it for days after.

posted by Cos Θ @ 3:30 PM