Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)
"Anna Karenina has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband, and an adored son, but her existence seems empty. When she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky she rejects her marriage and turns to him to fulfill her passionate nature - with devastating results. One of the world's greatest novels, Anna Karenina is both an immortal drama of personal conflict and social scandal and a vivid, richly textured panorama of nineteenth-century Russia."
For the most part, I enjoyed this book, although it was quite long - and sometimes felt it. The main story, of Anna, Karenin and Vronsky was interesting, and the Kitty and Levin arc was kind of cute, although dull at times, but the book is so much more than just those main stories. Sometimes it seems like it would have been better to just focus on those, rather than undertaking the ambitious task of depicting Russian society as much as it does, because that got really tedious sometimes, and kept the main story from moving forward. As a result, I kind of felt like we missed some of the key moments in the Anna-Vronsky relationship. Instead of really watching them fall in love, and watch their love grow and then start to flounder, it was more like we just peeked in on them from time to time. So instead of a flow, they just jumped from one state to another. As a result, it was not only not entirely clear how they came together in the first place, but the trip from being happy and in love to being jealous, stifled, and drifted apart seemed really abrupt. So it was hard to sympathize with Anna's final decision, because you don't really fully see where she's coming from. She's just suddenly decided that Vronsky doesn't love her anymore, and that's it. I just feel like the end would have been more poignant if we could either really see that she was right, or have it made more clear that she was just imagining things, and couldn't have been more wrong.
I also didn't really feel like there was enough dealing with the fallout from that decision. We get a brief telling of Vronsky's reaction, and a little bit about what happens to Vronsky and their daughter, but that's it. All too quickly, we moved on to a lengthy denouement almost entirely made up of Levin's philosophizing. And on that note, as I said, some of the Levin-Kitty story was cute, but I felt there was way too much time devoted to Levin farming and/or thinking about farming and his ponderings about philosophy. I get that part of Tolstoy's intent with this book was to discuss his own philosophies, and the Russian situation generally, but I really found it tedious. If I knew more about farming or Russian history, maybe it would have been more interesting, but with little or no knowledge on either subject, the in-depth discussion of farming philosophies and the superficial discussion of the country's situation and politics were just not that engrossing to me.
Some of it was neat, though. I learned about Russian orthodox wedding traditions, and that was interesting. But ultimately, aside from Levin, who I didn't really relate to, I didn't get enough of a sense of the characters' true natures and motivations, and that just made me kind of unsympathetic to most of them. I still enjoyed reading the book, and I'm glad I did, but it wasn't as personal a story as I expected it to be.
Bible Update: Finished Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, and am making my way through Job, which is longer than I remembered it being...
Next up: Before Dishonor, by Peter David
For the most part, I enjoyed this book, although it was quite long - and sometimes felt it. The main story, of Anna, Karenin and Vronsky was interesting, and the Kitty and Levin arc was kind of cute, although dull at times, but the book is so much more than just those main stories. Sometimes it seems like it would have been better to just focus on those, rather than undertaking the ambitious task of depicting Russian society as much as it does, because that got really tedious sometimes, and kept the main story from moving forward. As a result, I kind of felt like we missed some of the key moments in the Anna-Vronsky relationship. Instead of really watching them fall in love, and watch their love grow and then start to flounder, it was more like we just peeked in on them from time to time. So instead of a flow, they just jumped from one state to another. As a result, it was not only not entirely clear how they came together in the first place, but the trip from being happy and in love to being jealous, stifled, and drifted apart seemed really abrupt. So it was hard to sympathize with Anna's final decision, because you don't really fully see where she's coming from. She's just suddenly decided that Vronsky doesn't love her anymore, and that's it. I just feel like the end would have been more poignant if we could either really see that she was right, or have it made more clear that she was just imagining things, and couldn't have been more wrong.
I also didn't really feel like there was enough dealing with the fallout from that decision. We get a brief telling of Vronsky's reaction, and a little bit about what happens to Vronsky and their daughter, but that's it. All too quickly, we moved on to a lengthy denouement almost entirely made up of Levin's philosophizing. And on that note, as I said, some of the Levin-Kitty story was cute, but I felt there was way too much time devoted to Levin farming and/or thinking about farming and his ponderings about philosophy. I get that part of Tolstoy's intent with this book was to discuss his own philosophies, and the Russian situation generally, but I really found it tedious. If I knew more about farming or Russian history, maybe it would have been more interesting, but with little or no knowledge on either subject, the in-depth discussion of farming philosophies and the superficial discussion of the country's situation and politics were just not that engrossing to me.
Some of it was neat, though. I learned about Russian orthodox wedding traditions, and that was interesting. But ultimately, aside from Levin, who I didn't really relate to, I didn't get enough of a sense of the characters' true natures and motivations, and that just made me kind of unsympathetic to most of them. I still enjoyed reading the book, and I'm glad I did, but it wasn't as personal a story as I expected it to be.
Bible Update: Finished Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, and am making my way through Job, which is longer than I remembered it being...
Next up: Before Dishonor, by Peter David