Life And Fate
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Review
Vasily Grossman's masterpiece, Life and Fate, is fascinating for many reasons...it is both a pastiche and a personal statement. -- London Review of Books, From John Lanchester's review, LRB 18 October 2007
Book Description
The greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
130 of 132 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exceptional - check out the last pages first,
By
This review is from: Life And Fate (Paperback)
I can't really add much to the previous reviews, as this is an exceptional novel and truely gripping all the way through (no mean feat for nearly 900 pages). If you're familiar with other Grossman writings (e.g. his diaries) then you can see that many of the characters and situations are taken from real experiences and people that he encountered during his war reporting. To me that makes it an even better read, as whilst a novel, it is based soundly on real life.One tip, check out the character index at the back of the book, before you start reading. Unless you're good with Russian names, it can be a bit hard to follow at first. The index (which I only discovered three quarters of the way though) really helps with identifying who is who. No question that this is a five star book.
211 of 215 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterpiece,
By A Customer
This review is from: Life And Fate (Paperback)
I was always of the view that, thanks to the PhD industry, there weren’t any neglected masterpieces out there. Life and Fate has proved me wrong. What I loved about this book was its scale, its ambition, and its earnestness. Grossman has something of passionate importance to tell the world. The book could just as easily have been entitled Good and Evil, Freedom and Slavery, or War and Peace.Despite the book’s settings - German concentration and Russian labour camps, the Lubyanka, Stalingrad - it’s not fundamentally grim. Grossman is as interested in the nature of Good as he is of Evil. A 50 year old woman doctor ‘adopts’ a small boy as the doors of the gas chamber shut. The commander of a tank battalion spares his men by holding fire for ten minutes with Stalin breathing down his neck.. A Russian woman comforts a dying German soldier. Grossman believed in the individual and the individual’s essential humanity. This is easy to say and seems sententious when made written down but he also believes in literature with a capital L. The task he sets himself is to create characters and settings that demonstrate this humanity. Fabulous stuff. Be warned. Clever postmodernist novels are going to look pretty trivial after this.
33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Russian novel of the Soviet era,
By
This review is from: Life And Fate (Paperback)
This is a monumental novel, worthy of the description that has sometimes been applied to it of being the twentieth century's War and Peace. It details a range of suffering and cruelties, both large and petty, on all sides. Many of the day to day details of Stalinism are here: the constant presence of denunciations and the way small events can make or break someone's life, such as the central character of Viktor Shtrum falling due to his contacts with non-Russian scientists and then rising after a telephone call from Stalin praising his work, or Krymov being arrested and beaten up despite his years of loyal service and belief in the cause. Other particularly memorable sequences include the gas chamber scenes and the dialogue between a Nazi officer and Soviet prisoner Mostovskoy as the former tries and nearly succeeds in convincing his captive that Nazism and Communism are marching in the same direction.I generally find descriptions of actual battle scenes fairly tedious to read, but they are there as they should be and due attention is paid to the significance of Stalingrad as the turning point in leading to the defeat of Nazism. From the Soviet regime's point of view it is hardly surprising Suslov told Grossman it could not be published for 200 years as it goes well beyond criticism of Stalin and destroys the whole raison d'etre of the Soviet regime. In this respect it goes beyond the much better known Doktor Zhivago, an excellent novel but probably more famous in the West very largely because of the superb David Lean film. For me, Life and Fate tops Pasternak's novel as the best Russian novel of the Soviet era.
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