Everyone has read this by now, and I finally finished it. Amazing, amazing book. Obviously, I can’t discuss it at any profound level and do it any real justice, so I’ll jot down a couple of thoughts and that will be that.
Make no mistake, this book is depressing as all hell. But I enjoy depressing books, don’t ask me why. My friend Eileen and I have ongoing debates about this sort of thing. We met in college as fellow English majors. She is a huge fan of Austen (need I say more [joke, settle down]?). I was never the biggest Austen fan. I can’t handle a book that ends in everyone being happily married. Eileen, on the other hand, doesn’t like any book that doesn’t give her a happy ending. Happy endings are a big letdown for me – I just don’t buy it.
Needless to say, this book was just my style. In fact, I believe I may have connected with it so well simply because it was as insanely dismal as I tend to get in my low points. Every aspect of every relationship is reasoned out, discussed at length, considered from every angle, and brought back to the worst possible conclusion anyway. That’s a huge oversimplification, obviously, but the book progressed in such a way that I felt as if I may as well have written it myself (although Tolstoy I am not).
I would have been hugely disappointed, of course, if Anna and Vronsky had come together and lived happily ever after, which is what Eileen would have preferred. Life doesn’t work that way, no matter how hard we try, and no one tries harder than Anna and Vronsky did. The couple that comes closest to a happy ending is Levin and Kitty, and even their future seems dismal more often than not.
Truth be told, I did not care for Levin. I am glad that I read all of the endnotes, and I understand Levin’s purpose because of it, and maybe it says something bad about me that whenever Levin went off to do his work in the fields and spend time with the muzhiks I wished we could go back to the interesting parts of the story, but I simply didn’t care for it. I wouldn’t say it was totally lost on me – I was to give myself a little credit here – but it began to bore me after a while.
Truth be told, I wish the book had ended shortly after Anna died. Maybe that’s just the fact that I’m accustomed to the now-more-conventional practice of an incredibly short denoument after a startling climax, but the last thing I wanted after Anna’s death was to talk about Levin’s soul. Uggh. But with the exception of the last 50 or so pages, this book was amazing. Too few books like this exist.
FIVE STARS.
