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World Hotels - Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics)
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List Price: $22.95
Our Price: $15.61
Your Save: $ 7.34 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.7342
EAN: 9781590172018
ISBN: 1590172019
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 896
Publication Date: 2006-05-16
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Release Date: 2006-05-16
Studio: NYRB Classics
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Editorial Reviews:
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A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers’ nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Simply amazing, unforgettable work
Comment: As an ardent reader of history, I was familar with the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin. But it took Grossman's "Life and Fate" to bring them to life. I almost hate to say it for fear of scaring readers off, but Grossman puts you there under the crushing weight of a society crafted by Stalinism, he puts you there in a Nazi death camp. As terriable as that sounds (and it is indeed), this book is simply too good not to be read. Its sweep and scope and rush of characters is pure Tolstoy. But Grossman combines this with an eye for detail that comes from his years as a reporter (he was a popular war correspondent in WWII) to make a thoroughly modern novel. Grossman shows how humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty and (almost as bad) indifference to each other, but also contain the ability to be caring and kind even to strangers they might have every reason to hate. If I had to recommend a handful of books as my top pics, this would definitely make the list.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good but not Tolstoy
Comment: The story is really epic and introduces you to a new world. However I felt that some of the characters were more symbols than characters.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Genius of the highest order
Comment: This masterpiece published by New York Review of Books Classics enters my Top 5 among novels by James Joyce (Ulysses), Proust (La Recherche du Temps Perdu), Tolstoy (War and Peace) and Gaddis (JR): it is pure genius in its epic scope. Inspired by Tolstoy's War and Peace and the siege of Russia by Napoleon, Grossman depicts the siege of Stalingrad by Hitler. Grossman narrates the epic from the perspectives of diverse players into whose lives the reader becomes immersed. The cast is vast and the Russian names are daunting to track but Grossman enables us to understand what it was like to experience the fate of Russians in World War II. The catastrophe was overwhelming as millions of people's lives were adversely impacted by the power of two great warring states on the front lines of Stalingrad. Yet somehow the resourcefulness, courage, strength, faith and every virtue of her people, tested under the worst human conditions, Russia was able to withstand the siege of Hitler only to suffer subsequently the immense cruelty of Stalin. The writing in this novel is nothing short of magnificent: it is great literature and profound philosophy by a novelist who knew his subject thoroughly. It's no wonder that Stalin wanted not only the manuscript but its carbon copies because the truth evident in this novel was certainly starkly and baldly critical of the State. At the end of the novel an old woman, Alexandra Vladmirovna, who to me symbolized Mother Russia, returns to the ruins of her home in Stalingrad and admires the spring sky wondering: "why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store -- hard won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp --they 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 ever have been or ever will be..." The translation by Robert Chandler was as masterful as the original writing itself: Chandler was articulate, true to the text and humble in bringing to light without affectation or coyness or ego the profundity of this master work. I wish there had been maps of the front lines, which I found on the Internet to help me gain my bearings with unfamiliar geography at http://users.pandora.be/stalingrad/maps/stanlingrad map 7.htm. Having read War and Peace, Grossman gives the master, Tolstoy, a real run for his money in this epic: don't let this masterpiece pass you by! It's a novel fated to change your life.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A better than you'd expect soviet era novel
Comment: With the exception of Bulgakov I don't care much for Soviet literature. I could never finish Dr. Zhivago or Quiet Flows the Don. This book I did enjoy. Particularly the parts that dealt with the jewish physicist (I forgot his name) and his family. The letter he receives from his mother before she's deported is probably the most memorable part of the novel. Some people compare it to War and Peace. I wouldn't go that far but it is good enough that you might want to read it again as I plan to some day.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Matchless
Comment: One of the most relevant, startling and magnificent novels never read. Awe-inspiring from start to finish: for the characters themselves, their historical counterparts, the author's world and the world at large. Evokes the Greek idea of "necessity;" no understanding, truth without any value, no solid principles, no foundation. You don't read the story: you tumble through it, terrified, grasping blindly for something to stabilize the free fall.
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