troisoiseaux

Read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which reads like how pressing on a bruise feels: poor doomed Giovanni, who you know from early in the first chapter to be fated "to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine" but not yet how he got there; the poor wretched narrator, who's rotting from the inside from internalized homophobia and willing to throw anyone and everyone else under the bus about it. Poor Hella, the narrator's girlfriend turned fiancée, whose brief period of being actually engaged to him reveals her to have such a nightmarish vision of midcentury heterosexual wedded bliss that it's almost a relief when the narrator's secrets blow up in their faces. An excellent novel, but HOO BOY.

In War and Peace, Nikolai Rostov— on facing the inherent contradiction of the top ranks of the Russian army being bosom buddies with the French now that peace has been negotiated between them, while wounded soldiers suffer in makeshift hospitals completely without resources, his friend Denisov faces a court martial for ""requisitioning"" a supply cart to feed his starving division, etc.; so many soldiers died fighting, and for what?— very nearly realizes that war is bad and unfair, but instead he gets drunk about it and insists that obviously whatever Emperor Alexander decides is best!!! So maybe we should all stop criticizing and complaining!!! (To the confusion of his drinking buddies, who literally did not mention the Emperor at all.) On the "paired scenes" theory of War and Peace, I had wondered if the parallel was between Nikolai getting goaded by Dolokhov into gambling himself into massive debt and Pierre getting himself talked out of his grand plans to liberate his serfs, etc., by self-serving estate managers; in fact, the parallel was that "all the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were carried out by Prince Andrei without display and without perceptible difficulty."