The beginning and the end of the novel “War And Peace”
At the beginning of the year, I did a blog posting titled “Have you ever read ‘War And Peace’?” and then two months later another blog posting titled “How to cover ‘War And Peace’ in six hours”. Recently I read an article entitled “War and Peace: the 10 things you need to know (if you haven’t actually read it)”. The last point in this article stated:
“The book has the worst opening sentence of any major novel, ever. It also has the very worst closing sentence by a country mile, which you will have to read four times before deciding that its proposition is perfect nonsense. In between, its greatness goes without saying: what sometimes gets forgotten is that it is not just great, but also the best novel ever written – the warmest, the roundest, the best story and the most interesting.”
So, as a service to the readers of this blog, today I offer you the text of the opening and closing of “War And Peace”.
The first line is as follows:
“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.”
The final paragraph is as follows:
“In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.”
I confess that these extracts from “War And Peace” do nothing to encourage me to read the mammoth novel, but I’m sure that there are some readers of NightHawk who are ready to defend the book’s virtues.