19 Dec 2025
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman is bad. This is just the misery porn that Yanagihara inherits, tempered with unconvincing moments of hope, usually just before someone dies. This adds nothing new to the war novel or the totalitarianism sucks novel, and added nothing new in its day either. War and Peace was his model but Grossman fails to carry out what made it great — the precise accumulation of detail about characters of all types in society. Here we concentrate on a broad range of characters who share a similar perspective towards life, and no one is well observed. We have all the standard people you expect for a novel dealing with these themes: a mother whose son has died, a lone genius split between conformity and truthfulness to himself (while distracted by an affair), the womanizing soldier, the general, etc... And there's little to make these caricatures surprising or human.
I stole this book from the LSE pub because no one had touched it for two years, and left it at my AirBnB in Seville because 850 pages was too many for RyanAir... Everyone rating this highly on Goodreads or whatever is stuck in sunk cost fallacy.