Friends,
After a search of this part of the forum, I could find no reviews\comments about the book; "Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman so I thought I would start a new thread on it.
I have just finished the 850+ pages of this book and whilst it took me about 2 months to read it (I only managed a few pages a night until my recent holiday, not the books fault just other commitments!) I believe this was time extremely well spent.
I expected a book that was difficult to start and one that would require effort to persevere with. I was pleasantly surprised to find that neither was true. In fact the only difficulties I had was a) with the Russian names (Only because Russian isn't my first language!) and b) the number of characters and their relationships with each other.
Whilst I never really overcame my problems with the Russian names, a tip I received about having two bookmarks, one for your current page and one for the page detailing who is who resolved the second problem.
Whilst there are many passages or entire chapters from the book that stood out for me, the ones I that I think that I will remember are:
The letter from Anna Shtrum to her son
The peasant women who helps a Russian POW that has been left for dead by his
captors
Sofya Levinton's journey
Stalin's telephone call to Victor
Have any one else read it? What did you think? Any stand out points for you?
Regards
Ian
After a search of this part of the forum, I could find no reviews\comments about the book; "Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman so I thought I would start a new thread on it.
I have just finished the 850+ pages of this book and whilst it took me about 2 months to read it (I only managed a few pages a night until my recent holiday, not the books fault just other commitments!) I believe this was time extremely well spent.
I expected a book that was difficult to start and one that would require effort to persevere with. I was pleasantly surprised to find that neither was true. In fact the only difficulties I had was a) with the Russian names (Only because Russian isn't my first language!) and b) the number of characters and their relationships with each other.
Whilst I never really overcame my problems with the Russian names, a tip I received about having two bookmarks, one for your current page and one for the page detailing who is who resolved the second problem.
Whilst there are many passages or entire chapters from the book that stood out for me, the ones I that I think that I will remember are:
The letter from Anna Shtrum to her son
The peasant women who helps a Russian POW that has been left for dead by his
captors
Sofya Levinton's journey
Stalin's telephone call to Victor
Have any one else read it? What did you think? Any stand out points for you?
Regards
Ian
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