War and Peace

War and Peace is the long novel Michael Berg reads aloud to Hanna Schmitz during the summer he describes as the glide path of his love for her. Its many hours of reading extend their familiar intimacy, but Hanna’s guarded response marks a change: she visits the novel’s world without making its characters part of her own, turning the book into both a shared journey and a measure of emotional distance.

The Longest Reading

The couple maintain their established ritual of reading aloud, showering, making love, and lying together. Michael reads War and Peace over an estimated forty or fifty hours, including its extended reflections on history, great men, Russia, love, and marriage. Unlike the earlier works he had read to Hanna, this novel is new to him as well as to her, so the reading becomes an experience they encounter together rather than a familiar story he simply delivers.

Hanna’s Changed Response

Hanna is absorbed in the unfolding book, but Michael notices that she responds differently than she did to Luise and Emilia. Before, she had drawn those characters into her own world; with War and Peace, she instead enters theirs, as if setting out on a long, dazzling journey or being admitted to a castle where she may stay until she feels at home. The image of a guest who never quite sheds her inhibitions captures the limit of that absorption: participation is possible, but complete ease is not.

Intimacy and Distance

The reading takes place within the couple’s intimate routine, yet the novel also makes their difference newly perceptible. Michael calls the summer the glide path of his love for Hanna, while admitting uncertainty about whether she loves him. Their shared journey through a book that is new to both offers closeness, but her withheld opinions and cautious relation to its characters do not resolve that uncertainty. War and Peace thus holds two meanings at once: a sustained common experience and an image of the distance that remains between them.