Challenging book - Rated 
This 900 page paperback book is a struggle to hold and manipulate: Not so much difficult to put down as pick up! The history of writing and publication speaks of a cruel intolerant society. The structure of the story is complex but worth patient understanding. I found the Russian names a constant difficulty; the glossary is essential reference. The sense of history somehow does not convey the full reality of the central battle of Stalingrad. The complex cast of characters is not particularly endearing. From a war correspondent one would expect more logistical detail and revealing comment to illuminate the vast efforts and sacrifices of all the participants. More facts might have supported the plot. The conclusive outcome is unconvincingly optimistic. Throughout I felt as bewildered as most of the characters. But I had to read such an epic story and am glad I did.
A masterpiece - Rated 
This book will break your heart. It will also make you despair for human nature. That shouldn't stop you reading it.
This is probably the greatest book I've ever read. First and foremost it's a good read. It also has something I can't define which I love about it. The sweep of the story takes in dozens of people, good and bad, and many locations but doesn't become confusing. I can recommend this book to anyone- those who love literature, those who are interested in war, and those who just enjoy tales of human frailty and strength. I recommend it to nearly everyone I know who reads- many are put off by its length but do not let this put you off- it really does fly by.
If you have the opportunity, you should also buy Grossman's war diaries- they are the non-fiction counterpart to this book.
Not an easy read - Rated
Long, I have not reached the end yet. Jumps about from stories that run alongside each other. Hundreds of characters with Russian names. Lots of politics.
Despite all this it's probably a good read for the intelligent and for me - interesting.
The Last Great Classic. - Rated
The full horror of what the Revolution and ensuing political turmoil did to Russia and its citizens is even today not widely realized. Add to this the untold misery and colossal loss of Soviet life inflicted by Stalin and the second world war and then, as if that were not enough, round it off with the disturbingly clinical and systematically planned and executed genocide as this was practiced by the Nazis before their collapse, and then write a book about it.
Transpose these events onto and into the lives of people. Create an inventory of characters so long that a list of the principle players taking up several pages is necessary for reference purposes. But don't sacrifice credibility for the purpose of size: invent them and imbue them with an appearance and a character, a complete and convincing set of physical and moral attributes and mannerisms, a set of idiosyncrasies neither too large nor too small; just enough to animate them as people in their own right: complete and recognizable. Then compose out of their actions a 3-dimensional map, a colossal web, linking - however indirectly - everyone to everyone else, everything to everything else. Give the narrative the impulse of events. Trace the waves brought into play by these events as they visit the public sphere and wash their way through the private territory of each of the individual participants in the great scheme of things. Tease the impulse and make it travel, see how it is collides and causes change and is changed, is deflected and flows anew, on down the narrative channel. Deadlock on the Stalingrad front, a misunderstanding between spouses, statements made in the heat of the moment and regretted bitterly, Stalin's next great blunder, the emergence of a new, state-sanctioned Great-Russia nationalism within the ranks of the (internationalist) Red Army, the frustration of a German citizen and his new found compensation in SS uniform and duty ..... and so on and so on and so on. Many events of various magnitudes, but not ad infinitum; just the right quantity and variety to erect a huge framework of the size and scale of a classic, an epic, without ever losing the plausibility achieved through attention to detail. Trace the great tidal waves of history and also recount how their smallest splashes arrive, depart and leave their marks in the paltry lives of men.
Life and Fate deals in 900 pages with this insalubrious juncture in the progress of the human race, and in writing it Vasily Grossman has deservedly earned himself the right to be counted amongst the lasting heavyweights of Russian and world literature. It incorporates and centers on events around the turning point in WWII, the battle for Stalingrad. Grossman was a war journalist, and was one of the first outsiders to see at first hand to what lengths the Nazi regime had gone in its rabid and all-consuming need to seek out enemies and then turn its people against them. Grossman's descriptions and accounts of (the Hell of) Treblinka were used at the Nurnberg Trials. It is not only the Nazi regime that is scrutinized. Viewed in context, the book is very brave. Like his own character in Life and Fate, the Jewish scientist Shtrum before his compromise, Grossman also refused to be quieted, but insisted, come what may on his version of the truth. This truth is a substantiated cry against the destructive and mindless anti-Semitism on all sides of the divide and equally a narrative documentary of the staggering excesses of the Soviet system in its blind battle for survival; not so much against the Nazis as against its own stupidity and gratuitous cruelty. Over 500 000 men lost their lives on the front, summarily executed as traitors. Hundreds of thousands if not more fell, the victims of at best ill-considered and often idiotic edicts, issued by bungling party bureaucrats but not countermanded by the military experts for fear of reprisals. These things are brought to light as never before. The descriptions of both Stalin and Hitler in their moments of doubt and triumph are revelations and further testimony to Grossman's immense perception and writing genius. The book, completed in 1959, was immediately banned notwithstanding the thaw following Stalin's death. Grossman was told that it would not be published in the next 300 years, such was its threat to the Soviet version of history. Suslov, whose prediction this was, was out by some 280 years: unfortunately, 16 years after Grossman's death, the book saw the light of day in Switzerland in 1980 thanks to the deviant behavior of some very well known Soviet dissidents.
Grossman has created a truly stupendous work. He is unusually evocative and his powers of description and observation are masterly. To the point of making his writing at times almost poetic. One can dip into almost any part of the book, and, without knowing what went before, find oneself drawn in, instantly convinced and absorbed by circumstances whose description makes them immediately real and characters who seem to contain no false notes, but ring very true always. The opening couple of pages should be enough to engender in any sentient reader a tantalizing presentiment for the grandiosity of what is to follow. And from then on it just gets better, becoming bigger, deeper and more resonant as it progresses, acquiring with reading a flawless quality. To structure the enormous events portrayed in the book so that the narrative flows elegantly and enticingly forward, to maintain throughout the entire telling a narrative tension that often makes the book difficult to put down: these are the traits of a great writer. I can think of nothing in Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago or in Bulgakov or almost any other contemporary writer to put their artistic achievements into a superior class. This is maybe the last of the great classics. It is all these characteristics that make this book, its author, and the status of both so surprising. How it has not found a central and eminent place in the canon of 20th Century Russian and European literature is almost as difficult to understand as the events it portrays. Having read it first in English, I then set out to find a copy in Russian. I was shocked at how difficult this was. Friends of mine from Grossman's native Ukraine had to send to Moscow. I discussed the book with many Russians and Ukrainians, educated ones at that, and was equally disappointed to find that, although the name was somehow familiar, hardly anyone had much to say about him, and even fewer people have actually read this, or any other of his books.
If you have got this far, and haven't already guessed, let me put it more succinctly: Buy it. Buy it now. Buy it and read it. Don't wait for anything. This will be one of the most justified decisions you have ever made. In no other avenue of life will you acquire this amount of quality for so little money. Its only downside will be to put other modern classics in a somewhat pale light. And while you're at it, try any of his others. Even A Writer at War. Especially interesting as it is a comprehensive and annotated collection of Grossman's private notes as a war journalist. And as such, the factual forerunner for the book in question. The hotel business has woken up to the inadequacy of the five star-system, I have done the same. This book deserves Six. The more people that read the book, the greater the likelihood that it will one day achieve the status it most certainly deserves. The Nazis were overcome, Communism has fallen: now it is time to complete the work by getting Grossman the recognition he deserves. Come on folks, stump up.
Moving, factual, breathless and gripping - Rated
I thought about what kind of review i could add to the vast database of positive reviews already. I would usually never add actual prose from a book in my reviews. This book is the exception. It has been ignored to long. A simple excerpt from the book would help some to look more closely. However, before reading this novel, know one thing. Grossman was one of the first journalists into the concentration camps in the east. So vivid were his manuscripts for this book, they were used at the Nuremburg trials. His mother died in the massacre of the Jews in Berdichev, Ukraine. He had much to think of whilst writing this masterpiece-
"She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought. She stood there - mute, blind, her eyes still open.
The boy's movements filled her with pity. Her feeling towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words or eyes. The half dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove his life away. His head was turning from side to side; he still wanted to see. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thin stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze's inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David's. He still needed his voice - he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in this world. He had seen the prints of children's bare heels in hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people's eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot was boiling on the gas-ring...This world, where a chicken could run without it's head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet - this world still preoccupied him.
All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn't feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he no longer existed.
Sofya Levinton felt the boy's body subside in her arms. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mine shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
'I've become a mother,' she thought.
That was her last thought.
Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll."
BUY THIS BOOK!!!!
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