Aug 04, 2015 01:42 PM
6349 Views
It took me around 2 months to finish this book, and it was a long, tedious and laborious process, but in the end it was totally worth the effort.
This novel is a work of historical fiction, written around 1869, and it is about the French invasion of Russia during 1805 which continued till 1812. This novel follows the aristocratic family during that time, and the plot revolves around 25-30 30 families of that time and a lot of side characters, which make this novel very dense and at places very confusing.
This book will draws you in quite a bit with its great description of character, poetic and narrative style of writing. The writer has also added up the war aspect, he talks a lot about the battles and the people involved in it, the strategies and historical analysis of what exactly was going on.
The writer has criticized and celebrated the flaws in every character, and even the female characters were well rounded. He also talks about free will and determinism, and how ideas of history change as we look back on them, because we start to try and find a single moment which could have completely changed the course of history, when it was more of a combination or series of events that are not controlled in any sort of way.
If you end up buying the original version do check out how many volumes it has, if it contains only seven volumes which the writer had serialized in the magazine in 1867, you have to search on the internet for the 8th volume which Tolstoy later adds up in his revised editions.
