Anna Karenina

nothing could have prepared me for this, i am a complete trainwreck (pun intended)

WARNING: This is not a strict book review, but rather a meta-review of what reading this book led to in my life. Please avoid reading this if you're looking for an in depth analysis of Anna Karenina. Thanks. I should also mention that there is a big spoiler in here, in case you've remained untouched by cultural osmosis, but you should read my review anyway to save yourself the trouble.

I grew up believing, like most of us, that burning books was something Nazis did (though, of course, burning Disco records at Shea stadium was perfectly fine). I believed that burning books was only a couple of steps down from burning people in ovens, or that it was, at least, a step towards holocaust.

If I heard the words "burning books" or "book burning," I saw Gestapo, SS and SA marching around a mountainous bonfire of books in a menacingly lit square. It's a scary image: an image of censorship, of fear mongering, of mind control -- an image of evil. So I never imagined that I would become a book burner.

That all changed the day Anna Karenina, that insufferable, whiny, pathetic, pain in the ass, finally jumped off the platform and killed herself.

That summer I was performing in Shakespeare in the Mountains, and I knew I'd have plenty of down time, so it was a perfect summer to read another 1,000 page+ novel. I'd read Count of Monte Cristo one summer when I was working day camps, Les Miserable one summer when I was working at a residential camp, and Shogun in one of my final summers of zero responsibility. A summer shifting back and forth between Marc Antony in Julius Caesar and Pinch, Antonio and the Nun (which I played with great gusto, impersonating Terry Jones in drag) in Comedy of Errors, or sitting at a pub in the mountains while I waited for the matinee to give way to the evening show, seemed an ideal time to blaze through a big meaty classic. I narrowed the field to two by Tolstoy: War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I chose the latter and was very quickly sorry I did.

I have never met such an unlikable bunch of bunsholes in my life (m'kay...I admit it...I am applying Mr. Mackey's lesson. You should see how much money I've put in the vulgarity jar this past week). Seriously. I loathed them all and couldn't give a damn about their problems. By the end of the first part I was longing for Anna to kill herself (I'd known the ending since I was a kid, and if you didn't and I spoiled it for you, sorry. But how could you not know before now?). I wanted horrible things to happen to everyone. I wanted Vronsky to die when his horse breaks its back. I wanted everyone else to die of consumption like Nikolai. And then I started thinking of how much fun it would be to rewrite this book with a mad Stalin cleansing the whole bunch of them and sending them to a Gulag (in fact, this book is the ultimate excuse for the October Revolution (though I am not comparing Stalinism to Bolshevism). If I'd lived as a serf amongst this pack of idiots I'd have supported the Bolshies without a second thought).

I found the book excruciating, but I was locked in my life long need to finish ANY book I started. It was a compulsion I had never been able to break, and I had the time for it that summer. I spent three months in the presence of powerful and/or fun Shakespeare plays and contrasted those with a soul suckingly unenjoyable Tolstoy novel, and then I couldn't escape because of my own head. I told myself many things to get through it all: "I am missing the point," "Something's missing in translation," "I'm in the wrong head space," "I shouldn't have read it while I was living and breathing Shakespeare," "It will get better."

It never did. Not for me. I hated every m'kaying page. Then near the end of the summer, while I was sitting in the tent a couple of hours from the matinee (I remember it was Comedy of Errors because I was there early to set up the puppet theatre), I finally had the momentary joy of Anna's suicide. Ecstasy! She was gone. And I was almost free. But then I wasn't free because I still had the final part of the novel to read, and I needed to get ready for the show, then after the show I was heading out to claim a campsite for an overnight before coming back for an evening show of Caesar. I was worried I wouldn't have time to finish that day, but I read pages whenever I found a free moment and it was looking good.

Come twilight, I was through with the shows and back at camp with Erika and my little cousin Shaina. The fire was innocently crackling, Erika was making hot dogs with Shaina, so I retreated to the tent and pushed through the rest of the book. When it was over, I emerged full of anger and bile and tossed the book onto the picnic table with disgust. I sat in front of the fire, eating my hot dogs and drinking beer, and that's when the fire stopped being innocent. I knew I needed to burn this book.

I couldn't do it at first. I had to talk myself into it, and I don't think I could have done it at all if Erika hadn't supported the decision. She'd lived through all of my complaining, though, and knew how much I hated the book (and I am pretty sure she hated listening to my complaints almost as much). So I looked at the book and the fire. I ate marshmallows and spewed my disdain. I sang Beatles songs, then went back to my rage, and finally I just stood up and said "M'kay it!"

I tossed it into the flames and watched that brick of a book slowly twist and char and begin to float into the night sky. The fire around the book blazed high for a good ten minutes, the first minute of which was colored by the inks of the cover, then it tumbled off its prop log and into the heart of the coals, disappearing forever. I cheered and danced and exorcised that book from my system. I felt better. I was cleansed of my communion with those whiny Russians. And I vowed in that moment to never again allow myself to get locked into a book I couldn't stand; it's still hard, but I have put a few aside.

Since the burning of Anna Karenina there have been a few books that have followed it into the flames. Some because I loved them and wanted to give them an appropriate pyre, some because I loathed them and wanted to condemn them to the fire. I don't see Nazis marching around the flames anymore either. I see a clear mountain night, I taste bad wine and hot dogs, I hear wind forty feet up in the tops of the trees, I smell the chemical pong of toxic ink, and I feel the relief of never having to see Anna Karenina on my bookshelf again.

Whew. I feel much better now.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina:"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Tolstoy draws us into the tragedy by looking down in disdain at boring, happy families (the Brady family always comes to my mind) and sells his book by deciding that unhappy families provide more variety and thus entertainment, however tragic. From the start, we know that things will end badly, so later when we are introduced to Anna and Vronsky, we are more fascinated by the details on how things will unravel than being surprised at the outcome. The phrase itself is perfectly balanced and stands alone in a separate paragraph - as if he was giving us the moral from the outset. A perfect start to one of the most technically perfect novels of all time - as a matter of fact, Tolstoy considered this to be his true first novel (he considered War and Peace (also an extraordinary read) to be more than just a novel).

What is the most important thing about Anna Karenina? Is it the first line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? This sounds so true but it isn't really.

Is it that Anna experiences much more intolerance for her unfaithfulness and leaving her husband than does her brother who screws around like a dog? Is it Konstantin Levin's attempts to marry into the aristocracy and his problem with religion? Or is the entire story just Tolstoy's way of seducing the reader into reading the political nub of the story, the feudalism that was at the heart of all politics, morality and social position.

I enjoyed the book when I read it, but I have to say I skimmed over a lot of the politics and did wonder which in Tolstoy's heart is the story he wanted to tell, love stories or political ones?

How I came to read Anna Karenina, appendicitis and an air hostess ending with a rotten tomato. I read this book when I was 13. I had a test on it in two days and hadn't even opened it so I said I had stomach ache and went to the school sick room. This was a tall, narrow room with a tiny window about 8' up and painted with shades of olive green and aubergine (eggplant). If you weren't sick going in.. those colours.... But I was away in Russia with Anna, her husband Alexei and Count Vronsky whom I swooned over. In the early hours of the morning, I really had stomach ache. At 4 a.m. I had an emergency appendectomy in a nursing home with an operating theatre. I was very sick indeed and in bed for weeks. Had I brought it on myself?

Never mind. Next day three things happened, one bad and one good and one fantastic. My period came on for the first time. I was a Woman! Yes! I told my mother and my grandmother leaned over from the visitor chair and slapped my face very hard, "That's to take the shock of the blood away." She said.

Then the good. My mother said I had been waiting for this day and she really let loose at my grandmother. They had a very fierce row. It was wonderful. My mother didn't love me and she never ever defended me or involved herself with me in any way. Memories of being slapped herself I suppose. My mother was very pretty and was the first of her family to be married. On her wedding day, her mother slapped her face as she put the veil on her. "Ruth should have been married first, not you." Ruth was her much less attractive and zealously-religious older sister. (She mellowed).

Everyone else in the nursing home was old except for an air hostess of 21. She didn't have a private room and didn't like being with the old people so would wander into mine to sit and read and eat all my chocolates, of which I had endless boxes. She brought her books - Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Zola. So for nearly three weeks my days were filled with reading, talking about books with my new friend and eating chocolates all day long.

I was actually thrown out of the nursing home. The food there was terrible. One lunchtime there was something forgettable and salad. The tomato was perfect-looking but mushy, almost liquid so I threw it out of the window and it landed on one of the nuns who was beside herself with anger. I didn't care, my friend had left a few days before, left her books for me too in exchange for some fancy ribbon-bowed boxes of chocolates.

We wrote for a bit, were penpals, but eventually that died. The age gap and where we were in our lives was too far apart. But I will always remember her and the fabulous books she introduced me too. Thank you Helen.

I will never forget Anna Karenina, apart from Tolstoy's political rants and plight of the peasants etc, the book was a pure gold, convoluted love affair. It was like all the best books are, total immersion in another world populated by real people whose lives outside of those described you could easily imagine, not just "well-drawn characters". Austen, Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Zola were just as good, all of them worlds I lived in when I read their books.

Review 1/2020 Rewritten 15th Jan 2020 to include more about the book.

Tolstoy draws a portrait of three marriages or relationships that could not be more different. Anna Karenina is rightly called a masterpiece. Moreover Tolstoy does not spare on social socialism and describes the beginnings of communism, deals with such existential themes as birth and death and the meaning of life.
Tolstoy’s narrative art and his narrative charm are at the highest level. He also seems like a close observer of human passions, feelings and emotions.
All in all I was touched by his book because it was one of the most impressive books I have ever read.

"Kendi yüceliğinin yüksekliğinden bana bakmasına bayılıyorum". Sayf 55

"Belki de sahip Olduğum şeylere sevindiğim, sahip olmadıklarıma da üzülmediğim için mutluyum."

Sayf 167

"Kadın dediğin öyle bir yaratık ki istediğin kadar incele, gene de hiç bilmediğin yanlarıyla karşılaşıyorsun..."
Sayf 168

"Insana akıl, onu huzursuz eden şeylerden kurtulması için verilmiştir."

Sayf. 758

I seriously really enjoyed this it's one of those that stays with you and the philosophy of it x I'm thinking of it days later, the intelligence streams off it! However I felt it slightly long and there wasn't enough Anna

Look it seems to be a favorite novel among so many great novelists - Nabokov, Faulkner, Kundra, Joyce even Dostoevsky but I happen to be more in agreement with Rebecca West when she says, "And plainly Anna Karenina was written simply to convince Tolstoy that there was nothing in this expensive and troublesome business of adultery"

If you read novels to be somewhere and sometime else (and don't mind that place to be boring) this will work for you. It is a perfect chronicle of its times. The trouble is I happened to be a very sensual reader. You see I am a book-izer and date a lot of books at the same time, and take different books to dinner and bed on the same day. Whenever I see a book anywhere I start imagining myself in bed with it and can't help running my hand on its body. And above all, there must be very good reasons if the relationship is to last more than a few days. Unfortunately, this one happens to feel like a long, stale marriage.

Marriage! I guess that is the real theme of the book rather than adultery. The subject has occupied minds of people for so long that there aren't too many new jokes I can make about it, I mean the best ones like how in case of a murder, the victim's spouse is the foremost suspect are already taken. Moreover, I don't fully understand the concept of marriage - this once I was about to congratulate this newlywed couple but I was just trying to imagine their life after marriage before the chance to do so occurred and ended up saying "condolences". That because "May your souls rest in peace" seemed like hoping for too much. The reason being that I think of 'being alive' to mean to let you feel all sorts of things. Now once a person gets married, (S)he is expected not to feel attracted, fall in love, etc outside marriage. And so to that extent the person is dead. And of course, there are all the sacrifices you are supposed to make for your children, etc (a lot of people are into that too!) which won't let a person enjoy his/her life fully.

Now, it is just the kind of thing that if it wasn't for the sake of habit, people would have given up long ago. I still think they will do so someday. If you trust a person, you don't need to bound them, right? With love, my understanding is far worse - I mean if someone loves his/her spouse and wants the later to be happy, shouldn't they be more like "Go on, darling, have some fun!" instead of jealously guarding them? That, by the way, is Levin's (Anna's antagonist) method - to ask his wife not to meet men with whom she happened to laugh.

n  
"Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls...
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music."
- Kahlil Gibran.
n

Still, because of some sort of barbaric instinct the heart wants to hold on to the person, it is invested in, to possess them like objects so as to be sure of their presence in one's life. It seeks promises, unbreakable oaths, until-death-or-divorce-do-us-aparts, more and more bounds - anything to save one from the fear of losing beloved. And where this need for security over each other's possession is mutual, a marriage takes place. Except, of course, all such promises are useless, no one can control his/her feelings by choice, and so no one should ask the other or promise such a thing. In fact, everything people do to gain security (or whatever form) only feeds the feeling of insecurity.

Only insecure and untrusting people seek promises and

"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Where you presume on security is where you set yourself to fail. All things given in love are gifts and no prices should be asked in return. Karein, Anna's husband realizes this at some point in the story and is able to fight back the famous agony of a cheated husband at least for a while. (If only I was to have a cookie for each book with adultery and jealous spouses in it I have read, I would have .... you know, diabetes. There should be some kind of restriction on each, like the no-mention-of-Hitler-in-debates rule, like a book with adultery in it doesn't win Nobel prizes or something .... but then Marquez wouldn't have won his prize, you know what, scratch that.)

Anyways, Tolstoy's argument against infidelity doesn't seem true to me. Anna didn't suffer because she cheated on her husband. She suffered because of three different reasons at different points.

First, because she had a conscience which is always a burden. How can feeling guilty about anything that can ever serve a purpose is beyond me. Guilt is a monster that like that Greek vulture which constantly fed on the heart (of Prometheus) without ever improving the victim's lot, and conscience is nothing except a set up to create a feeling of guilt among people. And to think there are people who feed this concept to their children! Terrorists never felt guilty of their actions, pregnant teenagers often do. A better world could be created if people teach compassion to their children.

Secondly, people, she is surrounded by. Many would say those were wrong times, times are not wrong, people are. Vronsky wants her, other people think of her as fallen women, the stupid divorce law ... you get the picture.

Thirdly, in the last parts, when she feels jealous lover Vronsky. It is not a self-induced fear of being cheated as often seen in people who cheat themselves - like Macbeth's fear who being usurper himself constantly fears being usurped, but rather the same old insecurity we just talked about. She has given away her son for him. We tax our loved ones for sacrifices we make them for them. It was too great a sacrifice for Vronsky to redeem in any way except by becoming a homely for her which he couldn't.

The novel has a misnomer. It should have been better named Levin, the author stand-in gets more attention than Anna Karenina. We read several boring chapters in which he gives his theories for agriculture, peasant education, etc which, though it might make the book more realistic, also makes it much larger and boring than it need be (something similar to what deviations and jokes do to this review). There are several beautiful moments in this novel but they are lost in the sea of monotonous realism, a combination that doesn't work with a sensual reader like me. The third star is almost entirely due to the last chapters of Anna's life. If it wasn't for that, I would have thought that it is Stockholm syndrome associated with large books that make people love this one.

Summer of 1985. My very manly brother, who rarely read classics, holding and reading a very thick book entitled Anna Karenina. “What is that thick book? Why is he interested on that?” I thought to myself. On the wall by his bed, was a big close up photograph of Sophie Marceau. Around that time, most teenage males in the Philippines were fans of this ever-smiling young lady and her poster was in their bedrooms. Our house was not an exemption. This was before my brother joined the US Navy. A decade after, Marceau played the title role in the most recent movie adaptation of this book. "Did my brother have a prior knowledge about it?" I again asked myself.

A couple of months back, my other brother gave me the link to The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. In its list of The Top Ten Books of All Time, Anna Karenina topped it over the other great works: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; Hamlet by William Shakespeare; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust; The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov; and Middlemarch by George Eliot.

In random order: Anna Karenina is Norman Mailer’s #1, Tom Wolfe’s #4, David Lodge’s #7, Chris Bohjalian’s #4, Peter Carey’s #6, Alexander McCall Smith’s #1, Francine Prose’s #1, Reynolds Price’s #1. Tom Perrotta’s #2, Susan Minot’s #1 and Claire Messud’s #5. As you can see, many of those are men. For me, this is an indication that this book, even if the title bears a woman’s name and with flowers on its cover (at least this wonderful edition of mine), is not really a woman’s book.

Did my brother’s unusual interest on this book intrigue me during that time? Yes. Did The Top Ten list make me finally pick this up? Yes. Considering its length and the one full week of reading (aside from working), was reading this a waste of time that I could have spent reading shorter easier-to-read 2-4 books? Definitely, not. This unputdownable book is worth every minute that I spent on it. So far, in that Top 10 list, I have only read 3 (Lolita, War and Peace and The Great Gatsby) but I can say that Anna Karenina has all the right reasons to be there. However, this book is not for those readers who have no patience in reading thick books. Although for me the vast scope of 19th century Russia is interesting not only for the lifestyle of the people (in the same reason why Austen fans love her books) but also for its historical significance. The book’s milieu (1882-1886) was Russia on its crossroad: few decades later the country became Soviet (Communist) Russia from being Imperial Russia.

On its superficial level, the story is about Anna Karenina, a young wife of a Russian government official, Count Alexie who is 15 years her senior. Probably due to their age difference and the fact that theirs was an arranged marriage, they are not happy. This despite the fact that they already have a son. Enter a young handsome military man, Vronsky, who fell in love at first sight with Anna when his mother and she came to St. Petersburg together in a train. Vronsky courts her and the two become lovers and Anna gets pregnant. However, Count Alexie does not want to divorce Anna and asks her to still live with him as a punishment.

At that time in Russia, the offending party has the option to grant the divorce and this party takes the possession of the child. Anna cannot part with her son even if she becomes pregnant and later has child with Vronsky. The Imperial Russia at that time has this extreme double standard on morality and the society condemns Anna for sleeping with another man. This reminded me of Diana, Princess of Wales who, when she died in 1997, generated an unbelievable outpouring of public sympathy despite having lovers while still married to Prince Charles. Of course, there were lots of differences between the two but I just wondered what if Princess Diana were in Russia in 1882-1886, would she have generated the same level of public sympathy, let’s say she herself threw her body in front of the speeding train?

Parallel to Anna’s life in the book, is Levin’s. Konstantin Dimitrich Levin is a socially awkward but generous-hearted landowner who was first ditched by the woman she loves, Kitty but later wins her heart back. He witnesses the death of his brother, Nicolai Levin and that scene, for me, is the most poignant of all. Well, except the train incident where Anna killed herself. Levin’s life in the book is said to be based on the life of the author, Leo Tolstoy, including the way Tolstoy proposed to his wife in real life. The denouement chapter of the book where Levin realizes that Christianity is the same as the other beliefs in terms of salvation is like having the author Tolstoy sharing his own thoughts about religion and faith. It is the most stirring being philosophical part of the book. Another interesting chapter is the second to the last part with Anna’s stream-of-consciousness prior to committing suicide. This part is said to have inspired the next generation of writers (Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and James Joyce who are all my favorites) in the use of this literary technique.

For me, the main theme of the book is: n  we cannot be happy at the expense of other peoplen. Happiness comes from within. We should not be happy because of other people’s unhappiness. In the story, Anna and Vronsky thought that they would be happy if they could live together. This did not make them thoroughly happy. Levin thought that having Kitty as his wife would make him happy. He was for awhile happy and yet later he still felt there was something still missing.

For the vast Russian panorama. For the strong interesting plot. For the way, Tolstoy developed his characters. For showing us the bits and details of Russian life in the 19th century. For the skillful handling of conflicts and providing stark contrasts. For timeless message on what life, happiness, marriage are all about, be it during his time or even now... I have no doubt that this novel deserves all those stars that Goodreads allows us readers to give.

I should have read this right away after my manly brother finished reading his copy a couple of decades ago.