Where it usually takes me less than a week to read a novel, I have been in Anna Karenina for about two months. As an excuse, I will hasten to add that I have been mostly engrossed in political stuff in my liberal magazines and that, plus the headache I've been having since Thanksgiving, have slowed me down a bit.
Furthermore, let us face it. Tolstoy is tough sledding.
I have never been able to understand how anyone can start reading a book without compulsively reading it until it is done. Personally, I have a hard time remembering what has transpired if my last reading was more than a couple of days ago. My friend Bud only seems to read when he is on an airplane or by a swimming pool. The result is that it takes him a year to finish a piece of pulp fiction. No wonder he does not relish reading.
I've discovered that Tolstoy is different. Sometimes I went as much as a week between opening the book, but the plot was so clear and the characters so memorably drawn that I never once felt lost. But that is not what I want to talk about.
I started reading it defensively. Why, I wondered, does a book have to be a CLASSIC in order to be great? Why does the fact that Freedom is easy to read and impossible to put down make it more trivial than Anna Karenina, or War and Peace, or Brothers Karamazov? Why does, according to the reviewer mentioned above, Tolstoy reach tragic heights when Franzen's wonderful novel is just a romance?
Sure enough, as I was reading it I kept wondering if the reviewer had actually read Anna Karenina, or was he just spouting conventional wisdom? At first glance, the characters seem every bit as small compared to the "big picture" as any of the characters in Freedom. Whole chapters are devoted to meaningless parties and horse races and grouse hunts where characters busy themselves with the minutiae of social discourse and worrying if they are wearing the right clothes, or creating socially acceptable impressions. Just like Franzen's novel, a good deal of Anna Karenina is focused on the political scene in Russia in the middle to late 1800's. Some scenes are clearly satirical. Some are didactic. Some are pointless
When I taught Edith Hamilton's definition of tragedy I always pointed out her comparison of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary. Hamilton maintained that Emma was a small person who dies a pathetic death while Anna is a great person who dies tragically. For the first 600 pages of the book I didn't think Edith knew what she was talking about.
But then I got to the last 150 pages where Anna spends most of them contemplating suicide over, to put it rather simplistically, a love gone bad. Where Emma's taking of arsenic is a completely selfish escape from a situation of her own doing, Anna's is characterized by dozens of pages of introspection and increasingly bitter insights into the nature of the world. She walks on the train platform by a varied collection of humanity, each scene disgusting her further. Her walk is a lot like Yossarian's through Rome looking for Nately's whore, or Dante's descent into Hell. The scene builds and her final throwing herself under the train is a jolt this reader will never forget, not because it is pathetic and painful like Emma's suicide, but because she is too magnificent in her delusions to end thus. There is nothing in Franzen's novel, maybe in any novel, to compare.
Juxtaposed to that is what has become my all time favorite character--Levin. This wonderful man goes through the whole novel loving his work, being confused by the inane pomposity of Russian nobility, pursuing meaning while the rest only discuss philosophy as a kind of parlor game.
He wants to know the answer to those key questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Is there a God? If not, why keep on going? The reader can see that Levin lives his life as if he knew the answers to the questions. Levin can't see that simple truth until the end. The answer to meaninglessness is DOING WHAT IS NECESSARY. He contemplates suicide, but he has his wife and his child and his in-laws, and his peasants, and god knows what else that he has to live for.
"But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living."
He kept passing the open windows.
We see Levin in the pages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby ("So we beat on . . . "), and in Wally in My Dinner With Andre.
Levin comes to this realization in a flash of insight, just like most of us do, but with a lot more poetry. And then, and this is what I most like about the book, as soon as he gets up from being in the field and looking at the dome of the sky, he reenters the real world with its pettiness and selfishness and joins in whole heartedly.
"I shall go in my same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."
2 comments:
"I initially started to read it because after I read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and some reviews that basically said it couldn't compare to the greatness of Russian novels, I wanted to see if the reviewers were right."
Jeepers. That's some dedication!
"Tolstoy is tough sledding." *snort* :D
And look at you, going ga-ga over Levin that way! That's fantastic. You are really enthusiastic in your analysis, and man, that excerpt. ZING. Terrific stuff.
You made me want to read this. A little bit.
Actually, it's amusing when I think of this book. I think I bought a copy of Anna Karenina when I was about 13 because the book title was cool -- it was a name kind of like mine. I think I got through the first page, freaked on its density, and then never picked it up again. I liked the *idea* of the novel: that it was a classic, and had a cool title. But I never could be bothered with what was actually inside of it. This review makes me want to bother.
One of these days... I think I would rather read Freedom first, too, however.
Thanks, Mr. S.
P.S. This is a note mostly for Katherine. I was reminded about what I am going to write because of the reference to Moby Dick up there.
Janet and I were on the phone one day, talking about old CSU professors and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Dr Robert Zoellner's name came up (he had written an analysis of Moby Dick back in the 70s and he was well-known for it. He also taught 20th Century American Fiction, ergo the Hem Connection). I seemed to remember that Katherine had him as a prof up at CSU back in the day. While talking to Janet, and a little bit of Googling later, I turned up this post on a random blog link: http://agooddrift.blogspot.com/2010/03/in-memoriam-dr-zoellner.html
It was a very bittersweet post to read. Sad, but very touching. I thought that you and Katherine might appreciate it.
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