Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Schwerin, Germany, 1945. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
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I am always cautious when someone recommends a long novel. Will the commitment required to get through 900 pages be rewarded? My suspicion is that the person making the suggestion, is reluctant to admit that the time they invested wasn’t worth it.
I have been caught out a number of times by these semi-committed recommendations — most memorably with Hilary Mantel’s novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety.
But for years, one book has sat like a stone on my shelf, a permanent reminder of my failure to read it. I first heard of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate from the late Persian writer, Shusha Guppy. She had read everything, in many different languages.
She had an especially high literary bar when it came to novels, and a deep intolerance of those that ran over a few hundred pages (something she generally saw, correctly, as a demonstration of authorial ill-discipline). “There are only two truly great novels of the 20th century,” she once told me assuredly. “Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (obviously) and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate“. I had read Lampedusa and agreed, but it took me almost 15 years to get beyond the first few pages of Life and Fate.
Yet, in some way, great books wait for you, biding their time until the moment you are ready for them. And when I finally took up Grossman, late last year, I knew that I needed to commit a couple of weeks to finally climbing this literary mountain. It took a good deal longer.
Anyhow, I come down from the mountain with the unoriginal but urgent recommendation to every other reader that it is one very worth climbing. Though Grossman’s journalism (including his unforgettable first-hand account of the discovery of Treblinka) is a good place to start, Life and Fate is a narrative without equal. It is the story of the midnight of the 20th century. Rotating between the atrocities in the Nazi camps and the atrocities in the Soviet Gulag system, in the midst of all this, is the centrepiece standoff of the battle for Stalingrad: the axis on which the course of the world would turn.
So what is it that makes Life and Fate so deserving of the description “great”, a realisation of which more and more English readers — not least thanks to Robert Chandler’s translation — are becoming aware? There are a number of ways in which the term can be used of a novel; a key one is if the work appears to convey every aspect of the world which it describes.
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