Reading Room

"You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming."
                                                                                       -- Pablo Neruda

I read this quote in one of the news paper today. There were two thoughts that followed

1. Today, the man has enough power to not just to cut all flower, but also to stop spring from coming! With our thoughtless acts, we have caused climate change. In my mother tongue, Malayalam, poet ("kavi") also takes the meaning "scholar". We are now beyond the traditional wisdom of scholars of past ;).

2. Well, we have stopped the spring. However, there are greater powers out there for whom our spring is nothing but a bunch of flowers. When those powers are set in action, spring will come no matter, how many flowers we pluck, probably even plucking us away in that cleansing process!

Well, lets hope that the poet is correct and that the spring will come one day. After all, change is the only constant in this universe and it will be foolish to think that our action are final! 

Today I read War and Peace (യുദ്ധവും സമാധാനവും ) retold by K. Narayanan Namboothiri in Malayalam. This is a very abridged version having only 80 pages. At first it was not easy. There were many characters and names were not familiar. I had to make a deliberate attempt to remember the characters, their relations between each other and their importance in the story. As the story progressed, I was getting the feeling that story exists irrespective of characters and it is really the story of war and peace. The characters are there only to show the contrast between these two scenarios!

There were many stories of love, war, betrayal,poverty, sacrifice, pretentious imperial life, heroism, egos and of course of peace that were being interwoven. However, the love stories were the most used ones to show the contrast between war and peace. Especially the story of Natasha is very interesting. Before the war she is the girl friend of Boris. We then see her romancing Andrew and then Anatol. After her experiences makes her wiser, she is seen nursing Andrew beside his death bed during the tough times when the French had conquered Moscow. The death of Andrew is a great tool used by Tolstoy to tell us about the perils of war. This single death leaves behind a boy without a father whom he has not even seen much, a sister without brother and a (Natasha) an unmarried widow! At the end, she becomes the wife of Peary. See the transitions, the wounds caused by the war and the healing power of peace!

 Till the moment Andrew dies, the reader is tempted to think that he is the protagonist of the story. However, one can think in the same way about Peary or even Kutuzov!  But, the story really does not have a protagonist is what I feel. If there is any, that is the war! The experiences that come out of it are the real essence of the story. There are separations and re-unions, heroism and betrayals, hope and despair and much more.

There are other two aspects that have captured my attention. Tolstoy had tried to make things look brighter even when scenarios were of utter agony. He brought Nicolas, Mary and Natasha together to the bed side of Andrew before his death. Tolstoy has been very kind to his readers! The other aspect is perhaps an issue with translation. I noticed that many sentences do not have a subject. I am not sure if this is the case in original book. But, this causes a lot of confusion and I think it could have been avoided.

Nevertheless once you start reading the story, you cannot put it down till you read the last line. I am not sure if I will have enough patience to read the 1000+ pages of original. But. I will give it a try whenever possible.