Does anything compare to this? I haven't found anything

nope. that's it. this is the best book of all time. you nailed it, anon.

>>8341154
>observing with a neutron microscope

FUCK. KYS.

>>8341168
does anyone know what this guy is talking about?

>>8341158
yes.

>>8341154
how does it compare with Anna Karenina?

>>8341176
I LOVE Anna Karenina, but this is far more epic. Anna Karenina is really just two novels stuck together- that's not a trashing of it, but it's traditional, except for the fact it's about two parallel protagonists. So it's not particularly epic- it's just long, but very intimate.

War & Peace is as intimate as Anna Karenina, except instead of two main protagonists it has 4 or 5, and it's also epic, in scope and scale, including a large part of the work being non-fiction essays.

Even some of the sentences are epic:

>But Count Rastopchin, who now shamed those who were leaving, now evacuated government offices, now distributed good-for-nothing weapons among the drunken riffraff, now took up icons, now forbade Augustin to evacuate relics and icons, now confiscated all private carts, now transported the hot-air balloon constructed by Leppich on a hundred and thirty-six carts, now hinted that he would burn Moscow, now told how he had burned his own house and wrote a proclamation to the French in which he solemnly reproached them for destroying his orphanage; now he assumed the glory of having burned Moscow, now he renounced it, now he ordered the people to catch all the spies and bring them to him, now he reproached the people for it, now he banished all the French from Moscow, now he allowed Mme Aubert-Chalmet, the center of all the French population of all Moscow, to remain in the city and ordered the old and venerable postmaster general Klyucharev, who had done nothing particularly wrong, to be arrested and exiled; now he gathered the people on the Three Hills to fight the French, now, in order to be rid of those same people, he turned them loose to murder a man and escaped through a back gate himself; now he said he would not survive the misfortune of Moscow, now he wrote French verses in an album about his part in the affair—this man did not understand the meaning of the event that was taking place, but only wanted to do something himself, to astonish someone or other, to accomplish something patriotically heroic, and, like a boy, frolicked over the majestic and inevitable event of the abandoning and burning of Moscow, and tried with his little hand now to encourage, now to stem the flow of the enormous current of people which carried him along with it.

I'd love to see Scorsese do that scene- it's like something out of Goodfellas. Things start out so civilised and mannered and particular and gradually become insane. The battles are great.