There are many reasons to distrust my opinion. My youth, and therefore my inexperience in all things; my lacking credentials as a reader and as a critic; and, more personally, a habit of restraint in my reading--I seem unable to commit more than an hour at a time to any book, regardless of how good it is. And yet, how strange it all is! That same youth, which implies naivete, may lend a freshness to the people and scenes constructed in books. I have read little; but am I not then more sensitive to the beauty of a turn of phrase; more reactive to the maneuvers of plot, for having seen less of both? Even those shallow single hours, seemingly antithetical to enjoyment, might keep me at a useful, because still critical, distance.
And while I insolently ape a type of passage that seemed to me to appear too numerously in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, I confirm him in his choice to emphasize human contradiction by offering up another of my own: that in fact I quite enjoyed the book. Grossman chooses to aim his attention at contradiction, and I believe it is a fine choice, given its ubiquity in every facet of life. And the Soviet Union, the book's invisible and yet omnipresent antagonist, makes for a perfect reflection of this fact about people, with its built-in paradoxes. As it was human-made, so it was human-flawed.
What I carry away from this book, both in memory and in impression, is Grossman's nearly faultless ability to find the universal in his characters. Little moments, the littlest moments--that Krymov and his comrade can't say the words that matter most to them; how Tolya's doctor meets with his mother more for his sake than her own; the self-jeopardizing honesty of Abarchuk which reinstates his permission to judge, and harshly, a recently murdered cellmate--these flashes of humanity, which tell me about my world even at great remove, illuminate this book even when the sometimes prosaic style fails to impress.
When we reach the end of a life, especially in a book, each penultimate moment is invested with immense meaning. Grossman, knowing this, needs little adornment to rend your heart even as he communicates the terrible juxtaposition of the trivialities needed to live when everything you have previously lived for has been extinguished.
From page 542:
How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife's hand for the last time? How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless memory of how, during the silence of parting, he blinked for a moment to hide the crude joy he felt at having managed to save his life? How can he ever bury the memory of his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding-ring, a rusk and some sugar-lumps? How can he continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognize in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother. How can he ask for a place in the barracks nearer the stove? How can he hold out his bowl for a litre of grey swill? How can he repair the torn sole of his boot? How can he wield a crowbar? How can he drink? How can he breathe? With the screams of his mother and children in his ears?