Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

[B&b ex libris]

Title: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Pages: 817

Okay, okay! I finished it!! That is an amazing feeling, or it should be....but this time it wasn't. I know Anna Karenina is hailed here, there and everywhere but to me it lacked that striking aspect that holds on to your eyes even when you should be putting the book down. I could put it down and then I had to open it and re-open it many times in order to try to get into the lives of the people that it embraced.

For the first 300 pages I really didn't like the book very much, after that I started enjoying it, I began trying much harder to see the value, and feel the love. So, from about page 300 until page 697 it was all "okay", but at that page...when Tolstoy tarnished my last hope of having the book contain one person of quality, it fell apart for me. I think my feelings were abused by the author one too many times and I felt mistreated and really manipulated as a reader. I felt that he had to do this because the book was going to falter, and he wanted a joust. Besides that, almost every night after finishing another section I felt like I had been in a fight with someone because the book is so jam-packed full of arguments, be it with husbands, lovers, mothers, children...it feels like you are submitting yourself to an 817 page long soap opera. well that didn't do it for me. Maybe it will for you, this book is a hit to so many.

I was once told that in order to really embrace a movie or book or play you need to feel like you can relate to someone, or several different people, and on different levels. You need to feel that they are going thought something that you have or just that their personalities are like yours...you need to be them throughout the process. I have felt captured by tons of books, movies, and plays on this principal. In this book I connected with no-one for more than a couple pages. I did at spots with Levin or Kitty, but I did not have that strong connection with them that would hold me.

I think it is excellently written, and it is a powerful testament to what things can come out of disputes, discontent and unresolved issues.The title really should be changed to Anna Karenina: "A book you should read so that you realize that what you think would make you happy, really won't it will destroy you...because you don't know how good you have it now"!

This is a quote pretty much sums up the entire book: "He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness it the realization of desires" (p. 465).

Read that quote, learn it...live it...skip Anna Karenina. (that's my advice...if you wanted it)

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by B&b ex libris

I was once told that in order to really embrace a movie or book or play you need to feel like you can relate to someone, or several different people, and on different levels. You need to feel that they are going thought something that you have or just that their personalities are like yours...you need to be them throughout the process.

I don't think I would go along with whoever told you that, as there are so many books out there where, unless you are some sort of social misfit, you are not meant to like the characters. They are deliberately unlikeable. The journey for the reader isn't so much to pick someone and latch onto them, but to follow their story and empathise. I didn't think there was anyone likeable in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, but you can't help being drawn into their worlds. It's not so much liking them, but wondering what they are going to do next, how they are going to achieve something, and how that affects them and others round them.

I think for me, with Russian novels of this scope, I wouldn't be too drawn in, partly because it's huge and I've always got one eye on the next book, and also because the names confuse me: one minute it's forenames, then its pet names, and then its patronymics. I would struggle to know who is who from one page to the next.

[B&b ex libris]

Originally Posted by Stewart

I don't think I would go along with whoever told you that, as there are so many books out there where, unless you are some sort of social misfit, you are not meant to like the characters. They are deliberately unlikeable. The journey for the reader isn't so much to pick someone and latch onto them, but to follow their story and empathise. I didn't think there was anyone likeable in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, but you can't help being drawn into their worlds. It's not so much liking them, but wondering what they are going to do next, how they are going to achieve something, and how that affects them and others round them.

I think for me, with Russian novels of this scope, I wouldn't be too drawn in, partly because it's huge and I've always got one eye on the next book, and also because the names confuse me: one minute it's forenames, then its pet names, and then its patronymics. I would struggle to know who is who from one page to the next.

I never said that you have to like them, but that you need to feel a common bond...it doesn't matter if they are millions of miles away, and if their story is almost completely different than yours. I will hold on to the advice, it holds true for me and I will stick with it. I didn't say that you had to, just that I will.

Yes, I thought the names would be confusing too, but it was fine.

[iiris]

Originally Posted by Stewart

It's not so much liking them, but wondering what they are going to do next, how they are going to achieve something, and how that affects them and others round them.

I liked Anna Karenina back in the day when I read it. And I never liked Anna one bit! I though she was really annoying. But I agreed with her, I understood her.

And that there is the beauty of this book. Everything in it makes sense. You understand the reasoning behind the choices the characters make, their actions. You look at the choices and say "yes, that is the best way to go", given the circumstances and their characteristics. Why did Anna marry Karenin in the first place? Makes sense. Why she didn't have a relationship with her daughter but a close one with her son? Makes sense. It's all logical, reasonable, understandable.

And in the end we're in a situation where Anna's actions, final actions, just make sense. They're the best option. That's the beauty, and the frightening thing about the book. Makes you think about the choices you make.

Of course, I haven't read the book in years.

[miriring]

Hye
I teached Ana Karenina several times. Students liked it, but I suggest to look for the Biography upon Tolstoi written by Troya.
In this book there is a very interesting chapter upon how Tolstoi decided to write this book. He found a short article in the papers upon a woman who betrayed her husband etc...
At first he wanted to describe Ana quite like a bitch but then he fell in love with her and could not hate her....although, being religious himself he punished her all the way until the tragic end....
There are 2, at least, versas of films upon this book.
A Brithish serial of several chapters which is GREAT
An american film which is shalow and not accurate....
Enjoy!

[nnyhav]

While I'm a great fan on Nabokov, I generally discount his Lectures, but the exception is his ruminations on Anna Karenin in Lectures on Russian Literature, which takes up fully one third of that book. Recommended.

[Dante Amaral]

Anna Karenina, a feeble woman to pursue the so-called "TRUE LOVE" in an unbelievably conservative society which devastates all her fantasies and pushes to the edge of self-destroying.

It make me doubt that very certain amount of authors around the world always depict the destiny of those with illusions or pure imagination into miseries or death. Virginia Woolf once said, "the poet, the one with illusions, should die." But I cannot understand it. Does it mean that the world, the humanity and the mind are degenerating? All the poets shall end up like Anna Karenin?