Rosellen and I were doing our all-too-frequent Trader Joe’s run when we ran into one of her book group colleagues. I had briefly been a member of the group as well, but I dropped out, not because I was the only male in the room but because I couldn’t keep up with the pace of the reading. I often read the books they discuss later, on my own time.
After some polite social chatter, this long-time member of the book group announced that she was considering leaving it after many years. Book groups are notorious for breaking up on the rocks of imagined slights and unintended snubs, so we braced ourselves for what might follow. It seemed unlikely after so many years together that she would be leaving the group for any of the usual reasons. In fact, what followed was this. “I want to read Middlemarch and books like that. The group is unlikely to choose something as long and as challenging as that.”
Like most book groups, the reading choices tend to lean heavily toward contemporary “literary” fiction, books that are recently out in paperback by authors considered more serious than those who produce airplane reading. For example, I recently read Horse by Geraldine Brooks which the book group had discussed a few weeks earlier. I loved the rich language, the engaging characters and the creative and complex storytelling structure. It’s the kind of reading I’m also drawn to, but it’s unquestionably a lighter lift than Middlemarch or even than other contemporary writers like Pamuk, Saramago or Pynchon
I respected our friend’s impulse to strike out on her own. What she was after reminded me of the Covid years reading projects that so many of us embarked on, but which were now more difficult to tackle when the pace of our lives has returned to its often unforgiving and unsustainable pace. That reprieve enabled me to tackle books Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Anna Karenina, but the one mountain I still hadn’t conquered was War and Peace.
The number of people who crown War and Peace as the greatest novel ever written is, I would contend, over-shadowed by the numbers who sheepishly confess that they haven’t read it. It’s not the difficulty of the read that has kept me in that latter group; it’s the length. Once I commit, it’s going to be months before I come up for air.
When I decided to read Proust, I reached for the copy which has been on our bookshelf for many years and which I can spot instantly in the libraries of friends of a similar vintage. But then I thought I’d better check with my son-in-law Peter, a MacArthur genius-grant translator, to see if I had the best translation, which I didn’t. It was more than worth the money to add his recommendation to our ridiculously overstocked library.
So, I posed to him the same question about War and Peace, only to discover (secretly, to my relief) that neither he nor our daughter Adina had read it either. I should note that the two of them are among the most well-read people I know. However, Peter takes requests like mine seriously. He sent a reading list about the controversy that rages in scholarly circles about the various translations. The heated writings about the four most well-known translations reminded me, as I told Peter, that translation ain’t for sissies.
I won’t burden you with the details of the controversy, but if it’s any help to others who might be going down this same road, I chose the translation by Anthony Briggs, whose 2005 work was done for Penguin Classics. Now I’m waiting for my order to arrive from Thriftbooks, which, if you don’t know about it, is a very reliable alternative to Amazon. I’ll see you in a few months, but I will come up for air long enough each week to fulfill my blogging obligations. A good snowstorm, a woodstove and a mug of hot chocolate would help me get off to a running start.
