Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Robert Chandler (Translator)

One of The Greatest Books Ever!by DallasFabulously

Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings

March 16, 2009: Life and Fate is an amazing book. The writing is fabulous and the plot, although unstructured, is great. It is the story of a Russian family in World War II. In the beginning there is no real sense of plot but it still manages to keep the reader interested. The writing is great, managing to give a real feel of the time period. The translation by Robert Chandler is a little bit slow in the beginning pages because of the length of the first few sentences but quickly gets better. By the end of the book it feels like the reader is no longer reading a translation but what the author originally wrote. The characters are realistic and the dialogue is very lifelike. Overall, Life And Fate is a brilliant book. Anyone that is interested in Russian history or World War II should definitely read this terrific book.

Reviewed by: Noah Famously

Genius of the highest orderby Anonymous

Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings

June 15, 2008: This masterpiece published by New York Review of Books Classics enters my Top 5 among novels by James Joyce 'Ulysses', Proust 'La Recherche du Temps Perdu', Tolstoy 'War and Peace' and Gaddis 'JR': it is pure genius in its epic scope. Inspired by Tolstoy's War and Peace and the siege of Russia by Napoleon, Grossman depicts the siege of Stalingrad by Hitler. Grossman narrates the epic from the perspectives of diverse players into whose lives the reader becomes immersed. The cast is vast and the Russian names are daunting to track but Grossman enables us to understand what it was like to experience the fate of Russians in World War II. The catastrophe was overwhelming as millions of people's lives were adversely impacted by the power of two great warring states on the front lines of Stalingrad. Yet somehow the resourcefulness, courage, strength, faith and every virtue of her people, tested under the worst human conditions, Russia was able to withstand the siege of Hitler only to suffer subsequently the immense cruelty of Stalin. The writing in this novel is nothing short of magnificent: it is great literature and profound philosophy by a novelist who knew his subject thoroughly. It's no wonder that Stalin wanted not only the manuscript but its carbon copies because the truth evident in this novel was certainly starkly and baldly critical of the State. At the end of the novel an old woman, Alexandra Vladmirovna, who to me symbolized Mother Russia, returns to the ruins of her home in Stalingrad and admires the spring sky wondering: 'why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store -- hard won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp --they live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished: and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or ever will be...' The translation by Robert Chandler was as masterful as the original writing itself: Chandler was articulate, true to the text and humble in bringing to light without affectation or coyness or ego the profundity of this master work. I wish there had been maps of the front lines, which I found on the Internet to help me gain my bearings with unfamiliar geography. Having read War and Peace, Grossman gives the master, Tolstoy, a real run for his money in this epic: don't let this masterpiece pass you by! It's a novel fated to change your life.