Claudia Putnam

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate made my shelf sag for many years before I found the space in my soul to read it. I’m not sure why now was the time. I didn’t feel particularly strong. Or particularly downhearted. But I studied Russia and Russian a lot in college and every once in a while I go on these jags.

This novel violates every rule you’d find at any writers conference or Twitter hashtag such as #askagent or #pubtip, and I find it tremendously depressing to think that it probably wouldn’t be published today, a mere 30 years after it appeared in the West (it was released in Russia in 1988). At page 396, Grossman is still introducing new characters. The action of the novel is interrupted at fairly regular intervals by exposition—in fact, outright essays—that take up entire chapters, covering topics such as free will, human goodness, the differences among fascism, nationalism, and communism, the history of the Jews in Russia, the role of quantum and probability theory in genocide, and the way totalitarianism asks people to sacrifice their present condition for an idealized future that they themselves will never see—and how, sure enough, they make that sacrifice.

Are you enjoying this read? a friend asked when I tried to explain why I hadn’t slept a minute of the night before. Not because I couldn’t put the book down—it’s too heavy, literally, to hold all night—but because I was so deranged by its content. Ironically, at the moment of Clare’s question, we were midway up a three-hour ascent of a defunct ski area in Colorado’s Front Range. When we reached the summit, we planned to head down through dense trees, cutting telemark turns in a place where there were no other skiers and no one to help us if an accident occurred. Plenty of people, I pointed out, would not consider such a day of skiing enjoyable, not without a chairlift and bindings that kept their heels locked down.

We were there because we wanted something more.

What I enjoyed about the novel was what I learned from it. The skill with which that knowledge was delivered. The scale and ambition of the project. Some days in the backcountry are epic; some nights with a booklight are, too. There really are no light moments in Life and Fate. You’re either besieged in Stalingrad, stumbling from the train into a Nazi death camp, trying to accept your fate in a Stalinist prison, working the physics behind the atomic bomb in an environment where your science is automatically bad because it’s based on the work of a foreign Jew, or having some intense conversation about the meaning of it all with one of the other 150-odd characters in this 871-page book. On every single page, the author just plain grapples.

This novel is home to no heroes, though many characters have heroic moments. There are also no villains, though many commit atrocities. This isn’t because Grossman has a tolerant or relative view of morality. When people do terrible things in the book, there is no escaping the horror of their actions. For example, for a long way and with a certain dread, we follow David, a Ukrainian Jewish boy who’s been separated by the war from his mother. The fate of the mother is one of the novel’s horrible lurking absences; no attempt is made to answer the question. For all we know, she may never learn what happens to her son.

On the train to death camp, David is befriended by a female doctor. This woman is offered reprieve when the Nazi officers ask doctors and surgeons to identify themselves. But, unable to bear the thought of a small boy dying without any loved ones nearby, she does not speak up, and instead accompanies David to the gas chamber. Grossman forces us through the last moments of these two characters’ lives. He handles it such that our tears feel both necessary and unsentimental, no matter how many accounts of the Holocaust we may have read.

But as our tears blur the page, he turns to the man who switched on the gas. And to the man in charge of watching the victims through the window of the chamber. We see these men through eyes just as as compassionate as those with which we gazed upon the small boy who yearned with his last seconds just to live an ordinary life.

So few authors can pull this off. I think of E. Annie Proulx and her stories of Wyoming and Northern New England. People run afoul of her debased redneck figures, and you feel compassion for those who do. You feel sorry for her incest and gay-bashing victims. But rarely is she able to shine any light on the perpetrators, to make us understand who and why they are.

And that, it seems to me, is the real trick of things. To bring us into the hearts of people we thought we could never understand. To show us that there is no one, not the tedious academic, not the narcissistic beauty, not the smarmy commissar who rats out the Old Bolshevik hero, not the death camp commandant, not the jealous wife who refuses refuge to her Ukrainian Jewish mother-in-law for all the reasons you might not want your mother-in-law living with you, impending Holocaust or no—not one of them who is not, in the end, a comrade.

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This is a book, by the way, that I could not have read on an e-reader. It’s the kind of book you want to have sitting on your shelf, waiting, for a couple of years, so you can work up to it. The kind whose figurative weight needs to be matched by its actual weight. Where you want the labor of reading it to do some honor to the man who risked his life to write it (and who never lived to see it in print). You need to be able to turn down the corners of pages  so you can find crystalline passages once again. And when you’re done, it needs to go back up there on your shelf and sit with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. So you can look up at it, occasionally, the way you look at old guidebooks and maps, to remember where you’ve been, and how you were changed.