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War and Peace, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 9
May. 19th, 2016 09:38 amThings have been happening in War and Peace, and by "things" I mostly mean "Pierre," who clearly was not prepared for... anything really, but certainly not for inheriting a vast fortune and being thrust into the center of Petersburg society.
Since we last left him, he has accidentally gotten married, gotten into a duel with his wife's purported lover, run away from his wife, and been converted to Freemasonry during a chance meeting with a guy on the road. Pierre is very easily led and I am concerned where he is going to end up in life.
In other news, Prince Andrei is, as I expected, not dead! But his wife died in childbed and now he will never realize his errors and try to make them up to her.
My friend Emma tried to read War and Peace in high school but gave up when Tolstoy killed her favorite character twice, the death not having stuck the first time, and Prince Andrei's not-really-a-death has me concerned that he's the one. Prince Andrei is the worst! How could he be her favorite? Oh, well, literary taste is an inscrutable thing, and doubtless I had questionable literary favorites in high school.
But still! Prince Andrei isn't even romantic! He's just kind of there, being a bad husband and getting shot in a fruitless quest for glory. If you have to have a problematic fave couldn't it be Dolokhov? Dolokhov is at least wicked WITH STYLE. He just gambled Nikolai Rostov out of 43,000 rubles because Rostov's cousin Sonya turned down Dolokhov's wedding proposal (and 43 was the sum of Dolokhov and Sonya's ages), which is petty and cruel but nonetheless quite dashing.
...It also occurs to me that I still have a thousand pages left to go, so it is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that there will be another character who dies except not really and then dies again for real.
Since we last left him, he has accidentally gotten married, gotten into a duel with his wife's purported lover, run away from his wife, and been converted to Freemasonry during a chance meeting with a guy on the road. Pierre is very easily led and I am concerned where he is going to end up in life.
In other news, Prince Andrei is, as I expected, not dead! But his wife died in childbed and now he will never realize his errors and try to make them up to her.
My friend Emma tried to read War and Peace in high school but gave up when Tolstoy killed her favorite character twice, the death not having stuck the first time, and Prince Andrei's not-really-a-death has me concerned that he's the one. Prince Andrei is the worst! How could he be her favorite? Oh, well, literary taste is an inscrutable thing, and doubtless I had questionable literary favorites in high school.
But still! Prince Andrei isn't even romantic! He's just kind of there, being a bad husband and getting shot in a fruitless quest for glory. If you have to have a problematic fave couldn't it be Dolokhov? Dolokhov is at least wicked WITH STYLE. He just gambled Nikolai Rostov out of 43,000 rubles because Rostov's cousin Sonya turned down Dolokhov's wedding proposal (and 43 was the sum of Dolokhov and Sonya's ages), which is petty and cruel but nonetheless quite dashing.
...It also occurs to me that I still have a thousand pages left to go, so it is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that there will be another character who dies except not really and then dies again for real.
