Cancer 169

In line with my, admittedly ridiculous, theory that I can’t die while in the middle of reading a book therefore I should focus on reading long books, I have just started War and Peace. I have read it three times, so I know the story pretty well. It is one of my favourite books. Of the Russians Dostoevsky is the cleverer, while Tolstoy is the better story teller.

War and Peace has a ridiculous number of characters, up to 600. The difficulty when first reading any substantive Russian novel (and there are many) is getting to grips with the character names, which are often alien to the British tongue. I am now used to the characters of War and Peace. I know them quite well. Tolstoy is very good on both war and peace. He fought at in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol. I visited the Malakov Redoubt in Sevastopol where Tolstoy fought. It has been preserved, though now it also contains large naval guns from the siege in the 1940s. He used his experiences to highlight the experiences of the ordinary soldiers fighting in Europe from 1805 to 1812. In peace he describes in detail the good and bad relationships between husbands and wives, friends, parents and children and so on. In the 1300 pages of my edition he has plenty of space to provide detailed accounts.

I am only on about page 200 so I am safely alive for a little while yet. Yesterday, visiting the Dutch home of the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm I, I bought Christopher Clark’s account of the history of Prussia – that is a 700 page monster. Any recommendations for long books welcome.

On the other hand I have been having some quite horrid symptoms over the last few days. It may be because I am on a chemo break, or it may be that your god doesn’t recognise the importance of long books, but I have had problems with my stoma, my flaky skin, more tiredness than usual, aching legs, even more broken fingernails than usual, painful fingertips, and all the rest of it. I thought I was the worst I have been but I looked back at a blog from last Christmas when we were in France and found a description of similar symptoms, so perhaps it is taking a chemo break that is the problem. On the other hand, hopefully the symptoms will go away in the next week or two and allow me a brief period of reasonable health before it all starts again in the middle of February.

I am still rubbish at taking painkillers. I know I should probably be having doses several times a day at the moment but I am taking Tramadol perhaps once a week and paracetamol perhaps every third day. I have always been averse to painkillers. As I have said before, pain is there for a reason.

Oh well, back to Bagration, Kutuzov, Prince Andrey, Nikolai Rostov and the rest of them being defeated by the French in 1805. Perhaps they will have better luck in 1812.