Short But Not Exactly Sweet. . .

When I put The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Castle of Otranto on hold, I honestly had no idea how that they are so short. I was, perhaps depressingly, thrilled by this fact, however. When one slogs through many books that are closer to 1000 pages than 200, the occasional 120 page novel is a welcome surprise (thanks, Daisy Miller, Turn of the Screw, A Christmas Carol, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Of Mice and Men, and The Garden Party!).

The Castle of Otranto was. . . weird. Yeah, that’s probably the best word for it. It rather made me think of this fairy tale book we got while we were living in Germany. Those stories were rather odd as well. The one from that book that stands out in my memory is about this woman who went to church on the opposite side of the Rhine from where she lived, and she did that just by walking on water. Which worked fine until one day she was all, this is weird, I wonder why I can do this. And then she couldn’t anymore, and I think she drowned. ‘m not sure what the moral of this story is, but I think it is something like, find a church near where you live and cut down on your commute time! Or maybe I just have commutes on my mind.

There really isn’t much to say about the story itself. I did appreciate that the romance went the way it did – well, up until she died, anyway. Usually the smart, interesting one ends up working with the guy to solve the problem, before being dismissed, while the vapid blond sweet young thing the guy was crushing on after seeing from afar ends up with the guy for no apparent reason (think Woman in White and Ivanhoe), and this story did not go that route (though she did die).

Speaking of death, Tolstoy’s little novel was all about death, as the title would lead you to likely guess. I actually really enjoyed this one; I hated War and Peace with a passion, but I definitely found The Death of Ivan Ilyich to be engaging, thought-provoking, and strangely moving. It’s shortness was definitely an asset, since for me, with Russian novels a little bit goes a long way.

What struck me most throughout the story was something I had read awhile back in an interview with an author for a book about chronic pain/what causes some people to experience more pain than others/some to have a higher pain tolerance. And in the interview, the author said something along the lines of, to care about someone’s pain, you have to care about that person. Which may sound obvious, but in many ways it isn’t. We are expected to show superficial sympathy and concern, but how often do we really care about someone’s headache, someone’s cold, someone’s knee that always aches when it rains? How often do we mostly think, this is very inconvenient for me, this sneezing is really irritating?

I kept thinking about that as I read the story and we see Ivan’s family, who to a large extent do not really care about his pain except in terms of how it affects their own lives. I found that to be the saddest piece of the novel.