Book Tamers| book reviews

I was pretty dazzled by Tolstoy’s 60 pages story. I was irritated by words that were meant to express the main character’s “decency”, stringency, gaiety and the sociability. The upstartness, the egocentrism of all the characters deploying in front of us, the “obligations” that a so-called normal person has towards his fellow creatures were quite irritable. The fact that hypocrisy is so present nowadays, the fact that we all show a fake kindness, keeping the appearances, the display of a certain decency in our relations with others and of a minimum of moral integrity, that must be shown with every occasion, these are all the reason for which every human being feels attacked and shook.
Golovin dies. There is no point in not talking about this; death is present even in the title. Although we know Ivan Ilyich’s end, this seal does not really transform him into a nice character. As in other works, we feel the weight the author puts in describing the social environment that has a defining influence upon the hero’s evolution. The society forms his opinions and feelings, modeling his character as it did with his high-maintenance friends. He is a nice and capable person, with a spiritual easiness that is so bourgeois of him, and his actions are always influenced by the collective common sense, and not by his own wishes. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even feel the need to find out which are his real.

The marital relationship is roughly regarded by the author. Marriage of convenience, made without a clear and precise intention, just because a thought popped and said: “In fact, why shouldn’t I get married?” doesn’t count for making a solid marriage. This man, with a robotized existence and who keeps the distance from everything and everybody can’t become personally involved in professional relations (which is actually praiseworthy), and he can’t even take chances in adventuring in his own life, because of the stupid and pathological need of easiness, pleasure and decency.
Hypochondria and fear of death, presented in a very naturalist manner, are exploited for the author wished to emphasize the fact that the way one lives is more important. Each human being’s loneliness when facing death is doubled here by the uncertainty of his own life, suppressed by the thought that he did everything comme il faut. His questions and anxieties remain silent.
I may have been a little tough on Ivan Ilyich. It’s true that at the end I pitied him; I hated him in the beginning for his empty life and rejected all the people around him. I hope it was the normal reaction of a person who can empathize, who knows that weaknesses are in each and every one of us, that it’s easy to forget about yourself, about what you want, and that is easy to justify yourself for failures and that a “settled” life doesn’t necessarily mean happiness.

Written by Ioana