And I've finally finished Sholokov's The Don Flows Home To The Sea. It's... big, for one thing, and it's only the second half of the Tikhii Don epic (the first part being Quiet Flows the Don). It's a book with a heavy, painful realism to it, but one that perhaps finds that clashing now and again with the author's wish to write a tragedy. Covering the cossack revolts and Russian civil war from 1919 to 1921 roughly, its protagonist, Gregor Melekhov, is a well-off cossack who ends up fighting for insurgents, whites, reds, and bandits; there's a lot of battle drama and cossacks sabring people to death, though the focus of the novel is on the complex web of character interactions as members of the cossack village of Tatarsk end up fighting for different sides and dealing with war. It probably contains considerably more vodka than the book I mentioned in my previous post.
Next bit has spoilers:
Through the course of the book, the war takes an increasing toll on Gregor's family (indeed they just about all die). The tension between an adventure epic and a slice-of-life story is present throughout, though in most of the book the moves between grand narrative and its impacts on the Melekhov household make this sustainable - it gets harder later on as the cast of characters in Tatarsk is heavily winnowed down. It's all shot through with beautiful observational scene-setting, though sometimes in a depth that might be difficult to catch onto for those unused to the steppe landscape. The large-scale and small-scale are linked together well through most of the book - the lack of maps is actually a problem, though, as it frequently makes it tricky to envisage the spaces in which Gregor is operating.
The whole book, being pinned in realism, gets no effective climax: from the grand scope of the White retreat and Gregor's eventual switch to the Reds, the final parts of the book increasingly zoom in on his smaller interactions after demobilisation and into inglorious bandit companies. It's a peculiar narrative trick to slowly extinguish the protagonist's hopes but in a way that feels oddly small and undramatic. Whilst in the middle of the book Gregor's wife got a long and dramatic death scene, his lover Aksinia gets extinguished very suddenly despite being perhaps the book's most important female character, and just a few pages thereafter Gregor's daughter is 'killed off' in the book's final conversation, her death merely a five word report that isn't dwelt on at all in the text. I wasn't sure, in light of that, whether leaving Gregor alive and with future uncertainties entirely ignored at the end felt like an appropriate closure or simply a shrug of an ending.
Since my muscles have been playing up today and I couldn't do all the word processing I had planned, I also read right through If Only They Could Talk, which is the first book by James Herriot (actually a pseud but I've forgotten the guy's real name) about his career as a vet. It's a very nice read; funny in a gentle and very British way, good for observations on Yorkshire and its people, and on animals too. Not necessarily a book for the squeamish, since it spares little when it comes to shoving the accidentally passed uterus of a cow back into its body and similar things like that. It's the first book I've read in 2019 that does not include significant quantities of vodka.