So a couple of Mondays ago I powered up my computer on a fine, cool morning and saw that I had an e-mail from my sister in Oklahoma. My sister in Oklahoma does not send e-mails – it overwhelms her, she says – and when she does, she doesn’t bother with the subject line. So I assumed someone had died, or was about to. I poured myself another cup of coffee. Then I read the bargain fare mail from Southwest Airlines, and Apartment Therapy, and a couple of others. Then, my sister: we’re dropping emma off at college next week so i’ll be sad for a while. do you want to read war & peace?
I am a snob. I know I’m a snob. I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m a snob. But, before I go any further, I want to say that my siblings and I are not the sort of people who go around dropping Tolstoy into casual conversation. What happened was that I started reading Anna Karenina - a book I wrote a paper on in college even though I had not read it - at my sister’s house earlier this year. That was when she told me that she’d just finished reading it herself, but that she’d read the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the current rock stars of the Russian literature set. “It was just, just wonderful,” she told me. I liked it well enough when I finished it nearly three months later. But over the summer, I returned to novels by authors who used naming conventions I could easily understand. I read The Corrections, East of Eden, Look Homeward Angel, two novels by Flannery O’Connor. I fell in love a little bit with a novelist named Ian McEwan, a British writer whose work is said to elicit a sense of “serene tension.” I agree. At the bookstore, I leafed through the Prevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina and thought about giving it a go, but I wasn’t that moved by the story to read it twice. As I put the book back I saw the darlings of the translation world’s version of War and Peace on the shelves. It’s hard to miss. Described by Henry James as a “large loose baggy monster,” War and Peace is more than 1,200 large pages long. The print’s not fine but it’s not big either. Me, I thought as I walked away from the “T” aisle, intimidated by size. There is a first for everything.
The first War and Peace get together, which will happen on Sunday afternoon, will include not only my sister in Oklahoma but the one in Saint Louis as well, who I believe has forced herself beyond the second thoughts she had after reading through the list of main characters, each of whom has no fewer than four names, which are used in differing orders depending upon the social and/or military context of the scene and who is addressing whom, and most of which are variants of Alexander, Nicholas, Boris, Natalie, Natasha, Anna and Julia. Sometimes, just to keep it interesting I presume, the characters are referred to by their title only, such as the count, or the princess, or the empress. We’re going to have our get together using what I call the cheap person’s conference call system: the flash key. I’ll call Saint Louis. Once my sister is on, I’ll hit the flash key and, after the beeping dial tones, I’ll dial Oklahoma. Then, when my sister there is on, I’ll hit flash again, and we’ll all be connected. All six of us perfected this method when we were planning our mother’s memorial service five years ago. This time, though, whether we stick to Russia or delve into marital issues instead remains to be seen.
