A review by bluestjuice
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

3.0

Having read The Brothers Karamazov earlier in the year, I was expecting Tolstoy to be equally dense and prone to philosophical segues and meanderings. To my surprise, this was not the case, at least early on. The first 500-600 pages kept up a steady clip of society affairs and interpersonal drama, with hints of Big Questions but no lengthy chapters arguing different positions. Levin is the crux on which most of the philosophical questions hang, although Karenin touches on moral dilemmas as well as he tries to decide how to respond to Anna's adultery. In any case, I found this quite readable until the last few hundred pages, at which point things got more and more unenjoyable and unreadable, as Vronsky and Anna's relationship soured and began to circle the drain. The highlights of this later section were their actual quarrels (much more interesting than the pondering and second-guessing that filled the rest of the time), Anna's eventual suicide, and the birth of Levin and Kitty's son. I could have done without the details of the political system at the time. On the bright side, this less-than-exciting later portion of the book does a great job of making Anna's death seem like the relief she probably felt it was. I could have done without Levin's spiritual awakening in the final part, as it seemed anticlimactic, but I did appreciate the opportunity for follow up to see what happened to Karenin and Vronsky in the aftermath of Anna's suicide. I would recommend this.