Some long novels are commended for their vast casts of characters. I confess to having read neither War And Peace nor La Comedie Humaine. James Blish rightly commended CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength for including every kind of character. I listed them here. Poul Anderson's Mirkheim should be praised for the same reason. Anderson's The People Of The Wind, to which we now return, has several central human and Ythrian characters and one minor Cynthian character. Anderson presents sympathetic treatments of several unique characters on both sides of an interstellar war. However, I will try to demonstrate that there is also one unsympathetic character on each side but not tonight.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I too have not read Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE, but I have read some of Dostoevski's almost equally huge novels, such as THE IDIOT, THE DEVILS, and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. Solzhenitsyn's AUGUST 1914, NOVEMBER 1916, THE FIRST CIRCLE, CANCER WARD, all of them big novels, were read by me as well.
Other huge books I read were Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE, Melville's MOBY DICK, and of course Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
MOBY DICK is one of those books that I read so long ago that I remember almost nothing.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I loved MOBY DICK and read it twice!And while my second reading was also very long ago, I still remember it fondly. And Flandry's pseudonym of "Ahab Whaling" while visiting Diomedes in A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS was a homage by Anderson to Melville's book.
Ad astra! Sean
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