The war is better than the peace.

My paperback split into two halves at the spine somewhere around the retreat from Moscow, which turned out to be useful. I carried the second half around for three weeks and read the first half in bed.

Lidia Kúper's Spanish, El Aleph, done from the Zaidenshnur text. She was in her eighties when she finished it. I think about that more than is reasonable. In this moment I can't imagine giving five years of my old age to somebody else's sentences, and she did, and the result reads as if the book had been born in Spanish.

The French is the interesting problem. Tolstoy has his aristocrats speaking French to each other, and the choice a translator makes there decides what kind of book you get. Kúper keeps a good deal of it and puts the Spanish underneath. Anthony Briggs in English translates almost all of it away and argues, not unreasonably, that a Russian reader in 1869 would have understood both languages without effort. The Maudes leave it. I'm with Kúper, because when Anna Pávlovna switches to French mid-sentence you should feel a small door closing on the servants.

What I didn't expect: the battle writing is the best writing. I came for Natasha and Pierre and I stayed for the smoke. Borodinó from inside a man who has no idea what is happening — that is one of the honest things ever written about anything. Nobody understands the shape of the day; orders arrive long after they have stopped meaning anything. Pierre wanders around in a white hat being a tourist at a massacre and it is the most convincing account of a battle I've read, precisely because he's useless in it.

The wolf hunt. I have no interest in hunting and I've read the wolf hunt four times.

The peace sections are wonderful too, obviously, and Natasha at her first ball is written by somebody who remembers exactly what that is like, which is a strange thing to say about a man of forty. But Pierre's estate-management chapters go slack, and Prince Andrei's sky at Austerlitz is so famous that I couldn't get at it properly, like standing in front of a painting from a postcard.

Then the second epilogue. Tolstoy stops the novel and delivers a lecture on the philosophy of history, and it is not good, and I read the whole thing anyway out of respect and mild irritation. If you skip it nothing is lost. If you skip it you'll also feel guilty, so probably read it once and never again.

Nine. Not ten because of that epilogue and because Sonya is treated badly by her author, not just by the family. She's made dull on purpose so that Natasha can be vivid, and I've never forgiven it.

The two halves of my paperback are held together now with an elastic band and I refuse to buy a new copy.