(no subject)

[moon_custafer]

         Book 10 -- Now with Even More War

Ch. I-XI: It’s 1812. Napoleon is scary. Prince Andrei wanders around the war, looking for Anatole so he can challenge him to a duel for having tried to seduce/abduct Natasha, but doesn’t find him. He does invent chaos theory.

Ch. XII-XV: Elsewhere in the War, Nicholai has his own young sidekick now (where’s Denisov?!) Also he captures an enemy officer with such ease that he feels really guilty and embarrassed when he’s awarded a medal for it.

Book 11:

     Tolstoy: CHAOS THEORY, YOU LOT OF MONDAY-MORNING QUARTERBACKS!!!!!!!!

(More seriously: the first half of this novel was a slog, but somewhere around Book Eight, all the plots that the author had spent hundreds of pages setting up began to finally pay off, and it’s been really good for the last while. Now to go find out who’s not dead.)

The End:

GUYS GUYS I THINK I KNOW WHAT THE THEME OF “WAR AND PEACE” IS. IT’S:

#no really

 

More seriously -- Even though Epilogue I could pretty much be read as "and most of the surviving characters got a reasonably happy ending," it depressed me for some reason, maybe because it ended abruptly and sort of anticlimactically and was followed by a second epilogue in which Tolstoy recaps all the abstract historical-theory parts of the novel; maybe because Natasha and Sonya's endings were "being happy being an ordinary matron" and "being happy being a doormat."