Recently, a person I thought of as a friend recommended that I read this book by Leo Tolstoy. Strange as it may seem for someone who attended a hoity-toity institute of higher learning for a Bachelor's Degree in English, I had not read it. I do not like long books. I like Annie Ernaux, who seems to be able to say everything she needs to in 150 pages or fewer. I also like the short stories of Alice Munro and Flannery O'Connor because, well, they're short. I had read The Death of Ivan Ilyich, because even though it was not as short as the works of Ms. Munro (which can themselves be formidably long), it was not 923 pages. Anna Karenina is 923 pages.
The biggest complaint I had with this book was that it was long. This made the book quite heavy. I have a bad back, and carrying the book around began to seem like quite a burden. I wondered if I could simply tear out the pages as I finished them (or at least the irritating introduction by Mona Simpson), but soon after I started, my boy friend asked if he could borrow the book when I had finished it. Thus I could not destroy it. I thought of Mr. Coleridge and his famous albatross. Then there was the psychological burden of reading the book. There are death scenes. There are farming scenes. There are political scenes. There are scenes with moths and jam and ladies in the kitchen. I wondered if I would ever finish it. I thought that there might be a story by Borges in which someone is forced to read a book which goes on forever, and which is too tense to simply ignore. That is how Anna Karenina felt to me. It took me 4 weeks to finish.
Anna Karenina is about work. It is not about sex, as reputation has it. Nor is it about passion. It is about getting up every day and toiling hard. If you don't do this, it seems, according to Mr. Tolstoy, you will experience angst. Quite a few of Mr. Tolstoy's characters experience it, and so will you, in the course of the book, even though you will have to toil hard to finish it.
This book made me think of a lot of things, but most importantly, it made me think about the person who had recommended it to me. Did she hate me? Was this a gesture of love? Or was this intended as some sort of a "character-building" experience? Probably some combination of all three, as Mr. Tolstoy shows people are capable of. No writer, except maybe Proust, renders more completely the complexity of human motivation.
-- Alex Joseph
| Guest: Alex J |
