Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

I have been trying to catch up on all those books I skimmed or skipped over from my high school summer reading lists. It’s not that I didn’t read then, I just didn’t like being told what to read. Unless of course it was something cool, something that maybe my mother would not have suggested; then I could tell her, “I have to read it for school!”

So Anna Karenina slipped by the wayside. When I saw that I could download the audio book from the library, I asked my friend (who listens with me at work) if she wanted to hear it. Of course, who would say no to a classic? So, after what seemed like a hundred hours later, we finally reached the (anticlimactic) conclusion. Actually, we thought the dramatic conclusion was about an hour and a half before the end, but that’s the thing about audio books — while you don’t know the page numbers, you do have an exact measure of time. 90 minutes to wrap it up after the action ended.

Can you tell I was disappointed? Maybe reading, as opposed to listening, would have been a better experience. Russian critics dismissed this book when it came out, calling it a “trifling romance of high life”, and I can’t say I disagree. So many times, we were talking back to Anna, saying, “oh, get over yourself!” Then again, Dostoevsky and Nabokov both called it flawless, so maybe I missed something. I also think that men have gotten better at writing women over the years. There were so many times when Anna’s or Kitty’s thoughts or actions were so unnatural that they were obviously written by a man. This made me empathize with the men in the novel more than the women. This was probably intentional, i.e , women are evil and only after our money, titles, land, etc.

I won’t embarrass myself by attempting to summarize what does amount to a sweeping narrative, including many characters inspired by actual people of the time. I was happy to listen to someone else pronounce all of those Russian names so well; I know that if I had read it they never would have sounded so aristocratic in my head. I’m not sorry I read it, I’m just glad it’s over.