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A review by kevin_shepherd
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5.0
““I doubt of everything. I sometimes even have doubts of the existence of God,” Levin could not help saying, and he was horrified at the impropriety…”
NOTES ON A CLASSIC
While Anna is arguably the chief protagonist, she is but one of a ensemble of important characters—she enters the story several chapters in, and exits the story with several chapters to go.
There were two immensely compelling character arcs for me: Anna and Levin. Anna I disliked at the start, but slowly warmed to. Levin I liked initially, but near the conclusion he lost much of his appeal.
Part 7, Chapter 31: Here Tolstoy delivers a hard punch to the solar plexus. A swift kick to the proverbial groin. A literary event [spoiler omitted] that is emotionally draining. It is a master class in the art of putting a reader inside the head of a character and then evoking an unnerving commiseration.
There are roughly nineteen chapters at the end of Anna Karenina that seemed perfectly pointless to me. They’re not pointless, of course, but they seemed so because Tolstoy had just knocked the wind out of my sails - I was intellectually and emotionally checked out. At that point Levin’s philosophical pontifications on faith felt like an unnecessary epilogue.
“…on reading a Catholic writer’s history of the church, and then a Greek orthodox writer’s history of the church, and seeing that the two churches, in their very conception infallible, each deny the authority of the other, Homiakov’s doctrine of the church lost all its charm for him, and this edifice crumbled into dust…”
NOTES ON A CLASSIC
While Anna is arguably the chief protagonist, she is but one of a ensemble of important characters—she enters the story several chapters in, and exits the story with several chapters to go.
There were two immensely compelling character arcs for me: Anna and Levin. Anna I disliked at the start, but slowly warmed to. Levin I liked initially, but near the conclusion he lost much of his appeal.
Part 7, Chapter 31: Here Tolstoy delivers a hard punch to the solar plexus. A swift kick to the proverbial groin. A literary event [spoiler omitted] that is emotionally draining. It is a master class in the art of putting a reader inside the head of a character and then evoking an unnerving commiseration.
There are roughly nineteen chapters at the end of Anna Karenina that seemed perfectly pointless to me. They’re not pointless, of course, but they seemed so because Tolstoy had just knocked the wind out of my sails - I was intellectually and emotionally checked out. At that point Levin’s philosophical pontifications on faith felt like an unnecessary epilogue.
“…on reading a Catholic writer’s history of the church, and then a Greek orthodox writer’s history of the church, and seeing that the two churches, in their very conception infallible, each deny the authority of the other, Homiakov’s doctrine of the church lost all its charm for him, and this edifice crumbled into dust…”