{"id":20088,"date":"2016-07-21T07:36:09","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T06:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20088"},"modified":"2016-07-21T07:36:09","modified_gmt":"2016-07-21T06:36:09","slug":"the-beginning-and-the-end-of-the-novel-war-and-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20088","title":{"rendered":"The beginning and the end of the novel &#8220;War And Peace&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the beginning of the year, I did a blog posting titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=18900\">&#8220;Have you ever read &#8216;War And Peace&#8217;?&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0and then two months later another blog posting titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=19325\">&#8220;How to cover &#8216;War And Peace&#8217; in six hours&#8221;<\/a>. Recently I read an article entitled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2016\/jan\/22\/war-and-peace-guide-philip-hensher\">&#8220;War and Peace: the 10 things you need to know (if you haven&#8217;t actually read it)&#8221;<\/a><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">. The last point in this article stated:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">&#8220;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 \u2013 the warmest, the roundest, the best story and the most interesting.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, as a service to the readers of this blog, today I offer you the text of the opening and closing of &#8220;War And Peace&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">The first line is as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">\u201cWell, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">The final paragraph is as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;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.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I confess that these extracts from &#8220;War And Peace&#8221; do nothing to encourage me to read the mammoth novel, but I&#8217;m sure that there are some readers of NightHawk who are ready to defend \u00a0the book&#8217;s virtues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the beginning of the year, I did a blog posting titled &#8220;Have you ever read &#8216;War And Peace&#8217;?&#8221;\u00a0and then two months later another blog posting titled &#8220;How to cover &#8216;War And Peace&#8217; in six hours&#8221;. Recently I read an article entitled &#8220;War and Peace: the 10 things you need to know (if you haven&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20088"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20095,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20088\/revisions\/20095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}