War and Peace

By: Leo Tolstoy, Louise Maude - translator

Narrated by: Alan Munro

Tolstoy's finest literary achievement.

The novel chronicles the history of the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. The Encyclopædia Britannica states: "It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace".

Public Domain (P)2018 Trout Lake Media

Maybe not the right narrator

Look, it's like 60+ hours long of one narrator so I can only imagine I'd get sick of anyone's voice after that long. Keep that in mind for this review:

There are a few things that stand out as negatives: 1) Alan Munro's voice is so deep, it hurt my ears to listen to on my car stereo. I changed my EQ settings to a really extreme setting just to get it tolerable. Maybe with headphones it would have been better, IDK. It's the biggest negative in my book. 2) The audio editor added a tin-y effect things, only occasionally, when people in the story were in different rooms or far away. It was hard to hear and made for an awkward transition. A listener's willing suspension of disbelief would have sufficed. 3) The narrator has a stilted delivery, which I thought was intentional at first because of all the Russian names but the pace never got quicker, and it made the story harder to understand. 4) Sometimes it was like they spliced in a name after the fact because the original pronunciation was poor. This added to the stiltedness. Maybe a fluent Russian speaker would have been a better narrator?

As for the good things or neutral points: The plot is plodding, generally good but rarely exciting except a few parts. There are some parts that draw on unnecessarily in my opinion. There are parts where the author goes on at length, somewhat pedantically, on history, human nature, and society. I just don't think the length really helped make it better or clearer. There are some aspects that haven't aged as well for 2019 when I write this, primarily in the form of patriarchy, bording on misogyny at times, and maybe even overly sexualization of young women. Reading it in context of nearly 200 years ago, I guess it's something I can acknowledge and move past, but it didn't add to the book. I wonder how much is the translation as well.

The really good parts: I can say I finished a tome of a classic!

If you've got time to kill on a long car ride and nothing else tops your list or you want to check the box, do it, but maybe look for another narrator and consider if they are better or worse.

A listening delight

Having read the book a long while back, this audio book was quite a delightful journey to the past for me. I enjoyed it tremendously. It lasted long & didn't want it to end.

boring

I never could finish the book when I tried reading it myself. it's not any better listening to it, but I did finally get it done.

The audio recording is broken

47hr/15min into this title it skips. Wtf Audible I paid for this. Fix yourself.

5 Stars

Remove from my bucket list!! Loved it!! It took a very long time to finish, but the time went by very quickly.