Rating: 
Summary: The Fate of Life
Review: Grossman has spoken to us beyond the grave. It is with a heavy, Slavic accent in the "Russian" style - huge tomes, sweeping arcs of drama, a large cast of characters, death, repression, a cry for freedom and an attempt to make sense of both the internal and external world. Some reviewers both here and elsewhere have taken Grossman to task for suggesting that the Soviet regime was a mirror image of the Nazi state. Both were collectivist societeis, both exalted group rights over the individual, both were run by a party apparatus, Both employed terror on their own citizens and remained in power through sheer force. Germany has had to atone for her crimes many times over but the Soviet state has yet to acknowledge the murder of up to 50 million people according to the mathematician dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. The titantic struggle between these two forces forms the basis of the book. But it is not just the battles; Grossman allows us to see the human behind the machine, the wants and needs and hopes of common people. It is impossible for anyone who has not been in battle - particularly a siege - to grasp the futility and absolute unreality of the situation. That is why the small deeds and everyday actions seem to stand out; they are subtle reminders of a time without war, normality and reason. And in this theater of the absurd, Grossman documents the almost insane actions of the Soviet regime: The political commander's rabid focus on Marxist theory when people are starving, the wasting of human beings as mere objects, the violence and above all else, arguing Socialist theory amidst rubble, the dreary, gray, hapless lives in a totalitarain state. There are some who can never bring themselves to criticize the Soviet regime and Marxism's utter failure in almost every field of achievement - economic, political, artistic, financial, scientific. Grossman says yes, this is all true, but what counts are the pathetic lives of the unlucky but steadfast citizens caught in the grip of madmen; this is where the real crime takes place. It ends in a silent desolation that is almost stifling.
Rating:
Summary: Opening the Door to the Nightmare of Totalitarianism
Review: Growing up in the Cold War 1960's in the United States, I received the educational message that the Russian people (or, more accurately the people of the USSR) were basically a herd of simple minded robots who allowed a tyrannical regime to cow them into submission. However, there was a time when the US and USSR were allies in the fight against another form of tyranny, i.e. during the Second World War. At that time, the Russian people were portrayed in the US as valiant soldiers striking hard blows at the Nazi enemy, whereas their evil leader's deeds were whitewashed. Finally, after reading this book in the 1980's, I finally came to realize that the Russian people were were like many other people in the world, trying to survive and get a little enjoyment out of life, but forced to cope with war and terror brought by regimes lead by two of the most despicable leaders in human history. The horrible situation forces otherwise decent people to turn their backs on their friends, or even inform on them. Those of us who lived in the Western democracies can have no concept of what this was like. The story revolves around the Battle of Stalingrad which the author witnessed first hand as a journalist. The immense efforts the Soviet people made to liberate their country from the German invader, all the while having their own regime breathing down their necks shows what greatness people can achieve under the most adverse conditions. Although one of the other reviewers says this is not a story of "the triumph of the human spirit", and as I indicated above, many good people were broken by the moral dilemmas they faced, we can all be grateful that eventually the Communist regimes collapsed without bloodshed and we must realize that the basis for this was set by the sacrifices of Vassily Grossman's generation and we should also be thankful that his manuscript survived the attempts of the regime to bury it in order to tell us what that horrific time and place in history was like.
Rating:
Summary: What If Tolstoy Had Lived A Century Later?
Review: He might have written a book like _Life and Fate_. True, Grossman's epic lacks the didactic sections about history that have bemused college students for a century. But in scope of work, depth of characterization, and importance of history discussed, this book is both a conscious homage to, and true successor of, _War and Peace_. Warning: the plot is so absorbing it can make you miss your subway stop. I ended up going from Manhattan to Brooklyn by mistake when I used this as a "train book."
Rating:
Summary: The greatest little known book of the twentieth century
Review: I've long felt that "Life and Fate" may be the greatest book of the twentieth century that few people have ever heard of. It uses interlinked plots and characters to tell the story of World War II from the Soviet perspective. A fascinating undercurrent is the interplay between the Soviet war against the Nazis and the Stalinist war against the Soviet people. Fate could well "resurrect" a victim of the latter war who was needed to fight the former one. Comparisons with "War and Peace" are inevitable, and to put it succinctly Tolstoy was a greater writer than Grossman, but the history is better in "Life and Fate". A comparison could also be made to Wouk's "War and Remembrance", which uses similar devices to tell the story of the war from the American side; Grossman, however, is a more literary writer than Wouk. If anything mentioned above sounds interesting, read this book. You won't be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: 15 stars
Review: It has been less than a year since I read Life and Fate and I envy all those who haven't read it yet. The novel is simply about ordinary people in extraordinary times. Unlike in most of the popular crap we're being fed, people do get scared in this novel. They do find themselves turning their backs on their moral values and not able to do anything about it. Some of the passages in the book are the best pieces of literature that I have read in my life. The obvious one is Viktor's mother's letter to him from the ghetto. Another one is the conversation between the German camp commander and one of the old Bolshevik inmates. And perhaps the most intriguing is Viktor's reaction to the letter that is being circulated among the Soviet intelligentsia after he receives "the phone call". For those who are interested in Stalingrad, Life and Fate should complement many books that concentrate on the fighting itself. VG was a war correspondent for the Red Army from the earliest days of the war and he spent a long time inside Stalingrad itself throughout the heaviest of the battles. He was also one of the first journalists ever to set foot in the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. His mother was a victim of the Holocaust, and he himself went into hiding to avoid Stalin's persecution, only to come out when Stalin died. I highly recommend that you read the Garrards' "The Bones of Berdichev" after L&F. It is a biography of Grossman and a lot of the details in L&F make much more sense when read in the light of his own life.
Rating: 
Summary: A dissent
Review: Suppressed in the early sixties, translated into English in the mid-eighties, and published under Gorbachev's rule, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate is the most famous Russian novel of the Second World war. Historians such as Richard Overy, Catherine Merridale and Robert Conquest have praised it for its realistic account of Soviet life and its courage in Stalinism. Reviewers from Italy to France to Britain praised Grossman and compared him to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Now as Christopher Hitchens once pointed out, to be even compared to Tolstoy is no small achievement, so saying that Grossman does not meet this standard is hardly a damning criticism. Grossman, during the war a prominent journalist and later a novelists, was understandably horrified at the infinite cruelties and callousness of the Stalinist regime. That he is unsparing of the interrogations, the deportations, the tortures, the bureaucratic spite and viciousness, the way that political correctness encouraged cowardice and despair does credit to his courage. But courage is not enough, and one should beware those who believe it is a substitute for art. To say, as George Steiner, that Solzhenitsyn and Grossman "eclipse almost all that passes for serious fiction in the West today," is unfair. These subjects are powerful and moving is true, but beside the point. How could such they not be? Grossman must do more, and ultimately he does not do it. Grossman suffers the vices of a journalist. His writing resembles romantic magazine cliches ("His love for Marya Ivanova was the deepest truth of his soul. How could it have given birth to so many lies?) The sententious title, all too reminiscent of War and Peace, does not help. Passages are suffused with rhetoric ("No, whatever life holds in store...they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that every have been or will be.") and the comments about freedom are particularly hollow. ("Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom?" "Man's innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed.") Behind the suppressed liberal, a middlebrow is waiting to come out. Grossman writes at one point of how in totalitarian countries a small minority is able to bully or brainwash the rest of the country. This point has two flaws: it is a simplistic description of how modern terror works and Grossman does not bring it aesthetically to life. True, there are some stirring passages as the protagonist Viktor Shtrum finds all his colleagues at the scientific institute he works with drop away from him once he is criticized for supporting modern physics. But Grossman cannot portray the mind of an Anti-Semite or a Stalinist torturer. This failure is particularly damaging when one considers that Russian literature has no shortage of profound portraits of this sort of corrupt mindset (Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, even Nabokov's Humbert Humbert). While it is true that Hitler was not the product of a primordial German anti-semitism, Grossman's picture of the Holocaust where almost none of the perpetrators are actually anti-Semites, just cogs in an automatic system, is seriously misleading. (One thinks of Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army in contrast). Stalinism per se seems to be a caste separate from the population. This is misleading because it does not deal sufficiently with the internalization of Stalinism among the Soviet population. Viktor Shtrum seems surprisingly calm and composed towards the Germans who murdered his mother because she was a Jew. What is really odd is that most of the rest of the Soviet characters feel the same way. On both sides there is stoicism, a sense of comradely duty, thoughts about loved ones. There is not on the German side violent racist loathing towards the enemy. Likewise, there is surprisingly little rage, indignation, heartbroken grief and anger or lust for vengeance on the Russian side, though God knows there was no lack of provocation from the Germans. It would have been very easy, indeed one would think it unavoidable, to show reasonably decent Russians consumed with rage against the Germans. But that would complicate Grossman's picture of evil flowing down from a totalitarian state. It also says something that the Communists never win an argument in this book. (When a Russian prisoner of Tolstoyan pacifist opinions speaks of redeeming the world with acts of spontaneous kindness, no one actually points out that a lot more is needed to stop the Nazis.) A comparison to Aharon Appelfeld's novels, or Gunter Grass's The Danzig Trilogy, or This way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, shows Grossman's weakness as a writer of character. He assumes that most people are like himself. (Consider the failure in his portraits of Hitler and Stalin). And so there are endless scenes of people thinking about their loved ones, because Grossman cannot provide much more. They are endless scenes of women portrayed as the objects of men's affections, rarely as subjects, and certainly without the depth of other writers. (One notices that in Stalingrad the German soldiers have love affairs with Russian girls. They do not rape them). Strikingly, Grossman's characters are overwhelmingly Russian. Although the Soviet Union was a multinational state, other nationalities are usually only mentioned as reminders of Soviet persecution. In the end one is reminded that whereas Dostoyevsky could convince a reader that it is just and humane for Dimitri Karamazov to suffer the punishment for a murder that was actually committed by someone else, Vasily Grossman is unable to bring many of his liberal good wishes to life.
Rating:
Summary: Why does this great book keep being listed as out of print?
Review: The paperback edition of LIFE AND FATE has been in print, without interruption, for the last seven or eight years. The ISBN is 1860460194. Do not believe anyone who tells you otherwise. I am the translator of Grossman (the finest writer I have translated other than Andrey Platonov) and I am certain of this!
Rating:
Summary: Please please read this book
Review: There's a decent proportion of readers whose reaction to a Russian epic over 600 pages called "Life and Fate" is to snicker. If that's you, probably best to pass on. That would be a shame however, because this is a book about people in a situation which is everything ours is not. Where we are safe, prosperous and secure, the characters in this book are all constantly at risk. Grossman's magnificent acheivement is to allow us to empathise with these characters and explore a war of the bad with the worse. The pages do not "fly by" - but they do stay with you long after the book is finished. Grossman was a Soviet war journalist, and his coverage of everything from the battle of Stalingrad to the gulag is utterly gripping. It is not a feelgood book, or a "testament to the triumph of the human spirit". It is a beautiful, memorable tribute to how ordinary people cope with impossible situations. If you have any interest in life in an utterly different situation, this book is a purchase you should really, really not pass up. I cannot praise it highly enough.
Rating:
Summary: Those who ignore history are condemned to watch t.v..
Review: This was a wonderful book if you enjoy historical fiction. It starts a little slow and is very broad in depth and characters (which makes it a little confusing at times), but if you stick with it you won't be disappointed. It's an amazing account of the Russian side of World War II, and what's even more amazing is how Grossman manages to use this as a vehicle for an even larger theme of the rise of the Soviet State. It's a topic that few people know about, outside of the old cliches of communism being bad/capitalism being good, and it's worth reading just for the value of getting an impression of what life was really like for Russians and this crucial point in their history. As horrible as World War II was for the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others systematically liquidated by the Nazis, few people know about the similar situations going on during collectivization and the purges in Russia prior to the war. Grossman approaches this subject from the many different views of his huge cast of characters, and the reader gets a sense for not only how awful the situation was, but also how the situation was accepted and how each person was forced to deal with it in their own way. The book is amazing for it's breadth and amount of detail (which explains the 800+ pages), and the writing is philosophical and thought-provoking without being pretentious. I've read reviews that compare it to Herman Wouk's books, which I've read and greatly enjoyed, and a rough comparison might be made in terms of detail, but Life and Fate tends to bounce around a bit while a novel such as Winds of War had a more conventional structure and was slightly easier to follow. The only criticisms I could think of off-hand would be those mentioned before, the slow start and the vastness of the plot, and the ending was a little anti-climatic, but the majority of the book was definitely worth the time. It's rare to find writing of this caliber in today's novels, but if you want to read something that is difficult to put down, that is good to read and is also good for you, get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Those who ignore history are condemned to watch t.v..
Review: This was a wonderful book if you enjoy historical fiction. It starts a little slow and is very broad in depth and characters (which makes it a little confusing at times), but if you stick with it you won't be disappointed. It's an amazing account of the Russian side of World War II, and what's even more amazing is how Grossman manages to use this as a vehicle for an even larger theme of the rise of the Soviet State. It's a topic that few people know about, outside of the old cliches of communism being bad/capitalism being good, and it's worth reading just for the value of getting an impression of what life was really like for Russians and this crucial point in their history. As horrible as World War II was for the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others systematically liquidated by the Nazis, few people know about the similar situations going on during collectivization and the purges in Russia prior to the war. Grossman approaches this subject from the many different views of his huge cast of characters, and the reader gets a sense for not only how awful the situation was, but also how the situation was accepted and how each person was forced to deal with it in their own way. The book is amazing for it's breadth and amount of detail (which explains the 800+ pages), and the writing is philosophical and thought-provoking without being pretentious. I've read reviews that compare it to Herman Wouk's books, which I've read and greatly enjoyed, and a rough comparison might be made in terms of detail, but Life and Fate tends to bounce around a bit while a novel such as Winds of War had a more conventional structure and was slightly easier to follow. The only criticisms I could think of off-hand would be those mentioned before, the slow start and the vastness of the plot, and the ending was a little anti-climatic, but the majority of the book was definitely worth the time. It's rare to find writing of this caliber in today's novels, but if you want to read something that is difficult to put down, that is good to read and is also good for you, get this book.
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