Of all the scenes in the book, the one most resembling the later life of the Tolstoys is not a Levin-Kitty scene, but the final row between Vronsky and Anna just before she goes out to throw herself under a train. Tolstoy’s mastery of the feat of simultaneously putting the reader inside the heads of both characters as well as his own, as if the ball is being tossed from Anna to Vronsky to the narrator at high speed without ever being dropped, is one of the supreme moments of craft in all fiction … James Meek, LRB

… A statement so disarming, I had to go find it.
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” … yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”

How like me. A day late and more than a dollar short. (Attribution lost, to be found, this is such a terrific painting of Joyce.)

{ fin }

The charm of tragic literature is that we feel that its heroes could have escaped their fate but they do not succeed because of their weakness, their pride, or their blindness. Besides, Hugo tells us, ‘Such a vertigo, such an error, such a ruin, such a fall that astonished the whole of history, is it something without a cause? No … the disappearance of that great man was necessary for the coming of the new century. Someone, to whom none can object, took care of the event … God passed over there. Dieu a passé.’

—Umberto Eco

Yes, you must read through to the end. That is the way to the beauty.

A book offers us a text which … tells us something that cannot be modified. Suppose you are reading Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: you desperately wish that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel Anatoly; you desperately wish that the marvellous person who is Prince Andrey will not die, and that he and Natasha will live together forever. If you had ‘War and Peace’ on a hypertextual and interactive CD-ROM, you could rewrite your own story according to your desires; you could invent innumerable ‘War and Peaces’, where Pierre Besuhov succeeds in killing Napoleon, or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov. What freedom, what excitement! Every Bouvard or Pécuchet could become a Flaubert! Read the rest of this entry »