You can call it trivia, but we had bought the identical book* some months before we met at Katalin's swimming class for the first time. We also both had started reading Tolstoy's War and Peace in the restored original version at the same time (August 2004) , which was just before we copped off. Well, I finished this epic in prose about the insignificance of individuals somewhere over Asia on November 27, 2005 and Toño did it last night:
Toño's next book project will be "Matto regiert" by Friedrich Glauser. He can keep going there for a while. I have got Glauser's oeuvre. He happens to be my favorite Swiss writer. Maybe Toño's
* With one difference: Toño's copy has an inscription by the translator (in both Russian and German).
2 comments:
I am a great proponent of Slow Book as well. Especially if it's a really good book and you don't want it to finish.
I have a feeling though that War and Peace may take me until the end of time to finish so I think I'll stick to something a little less taxing for now.
Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace in German was a challenge for me. I wanted to improve my German, to learn about the Russian history and their cultural heritage, which has always interested me. While reading this great oeuvre I had to make sometimes some intervals, mostly when it came to the war scenes, which are not that easy to digest, but because of the masterly Tolstoy’s writing I could continue reading with a lot of interest. I was reading many of the chapters twice, because I could not understand the meaning of the narration, but many of them I read twice as well simply because I was enchanted. There where times in which I did not read for months and then when I continue reading it, I had to read just some pages to get it to the novella again and I was every time astounded how I knew what I have already read and what not.
My Slow reading was accompanied by visiting from time to time russian cultural events, visiting the country and trying to understand the russian soul.
I must confess that my fascination for this country has to do with very close friends of mine, who are half Russian half Swiss…
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