Well, I did it: Last week I finished Anna Karenina. This book and I go way back, so my sense of accomplishment is probably a bit out of proportion. This book was assigned reading for a course I took in 1987, 110 years after its completion. Why, I wondered, is any book 800 pages long? And what, I wondered at the same time, could a dead Russian guy from the 1800s possibly have to say about anything that matters?
A lot.
So here, from someone who left college more than two decades ago, are a few not especially original comments about the novel itself. There are many weighty, worldly themes woven in and out and across and above and beneath the actual story. And the weaving is done in a way that I, as a confirmed language slut, find breathtakingly beautiful. But Anna Karenina’s secret sauce, if you will, is this: the fucking is endless. The characters in that storyscape are not at all shy about getting into one another’s pants. The way it’s described takes a little getting used to – Vronsky, for example, is often described in terms of “his urgency,” and “flushed” is not an uncommon description of Kitty. But, just like today, when the sex is forced to fit into the narrative confines of conversations both internal and external, pandemonium is not far behind.
And that, for the most part, is what I like about this book: at more than 130 years old, update the names a bit – almost everyone in the book is named, to one extent or another, Alexander or Ivan in three or four variations each – replace the incessant exchanging of hand-written notes with e-mail, replace the servants, and there are lots of them, with administrative assistants and convenience store clerks and other groups we like to degrade as a matter of course, swap out Countess Lydia Ivanovna and swap in Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison and the novel could easily serve as a template for the nightly news. That amazes me.
So that’s what I was left with, basically: we have not changed at all. We perhaps haven’t regressed, but if Tolstoy’s text is any barometer, we haven’t moved forward either. When it comes to horsing around, the women in the novel are held to a very different set of standards than the men, which makes me wonder, as I have for years, why everyone doesn’t just get it over with and become gay. In a way that’s eerily familiar, the characters who populate the novel are on the verge of financial ruin – some closer than others – but the party continues, and these people, trust me, are lavish. In fact, it isn’t until page 669 of my copy that anyone even mentions that her cash supply is dwindling. And once it is mentioned, it’s quickly forgotten because there are parties and dinners to plan and host – kind of like our mortgage blindness, I think, our love of SUVs as the world’s oil supply declines, our institutionalized hatred of public transportation, which inspires us to continue building highways in spite of the doom that’s sure to follow. But here’s my favorite, from page 324: “Levin was struck especially by one little detail. The old peasant used the thinning of the rye as fodder for the horses. Many a time when Levin had seen this valuable food wasted he had wanted to have it gathered up, but had found this impossible. On this peasant’s fields this was being done, and he could not find words enough to praise this fodder.” I was shocked to read that, because I’d come to believe that “green” farming practices – or even “green” gardening practices – were invented right here in Portland, Oregon just a few years ago.
