Everything I said here about the greatness of the first half of Life and Fate holds true for the second. What strikes me most is how consistently he captures the contradictions of humanity, in situations both mundane and extreme. Some people are pitiless one moment and turn around and show great compassion the next; they feel exalted by events and then laid low by a chance phrase or an averted glance. This is not to say that his characters are random or that they behave with no apparent motivation; quite the contrary, Grossman shows their interior lives clearly enough that a reader can follow them to the highs and the lows, the betrayals that seem like the highest duty and the acts of mercy that they perform without a second thought, returning life when a much crueller fate might seem deserved.
Grossman’s canvas is as vast as the Soviet Union in the Second World War but most of his scenes are as intimate as a couple walking in the park, or a group of soldiers huddling in a cellar. Few chapters are more than four or five pages long, but together they add up to an epic of life and death during the war that’s as great as any on the subject. Part of Grossman’s brilliance is that he is content not to have all of the parts of his narrative connect, or connect only in the loosest fashion. He shows Soviet prisoners of war without needing to have them affected by their side’s advance, let alone having them rescued by other major characters, as a lesser writer might have done. He presents scenes within the headquarters of German General Paulus, humanizing the adversaries without lightening in the least what his army was fighting for. His sequence in a concentration camp and on the way to a gas chamber is connected only tenuously to the main characters — one of the people, Sofya Osipovna Levinton, is a friend of two women in the family at the center of the novel — but it is utterly heartbreaking without being pathetic or overwritten. Human to the very last, and the guards, the technicians, the attendants, the survivors taken out of the death line, all also recognizably human. The horror is compounded later in the novel when a character asks whether anyone has news of Sofya Osipovna, “she seems to have vanished into thin air.”