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A review by carlageek
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2.0
I have thought a great deal about why I failed to fall in love with Anna Karenina. It looked like it would tick many of my boxes - sweeping, immersive, trenchant, character-driven, full of compassion and psychological insight, historical, and on and on. How can a person who adores Middlemarch and Vanity Fair and The Way We LIve Now and even enjoyed The Bostonians do anything but love Anna Karenina?
Well, I don't know the answer. All I know is that for me, Anna Karenina was a tiresome slog, and for the most part just plain boring. To the extent that it has any psychological insight into its characters, it is largely superficial. To the extent it tries to broaden its scope outside of the navels of its characters and into social issues of the day (as Middlemarch does so deftly), it does so in the most tiresome and cheapest way possible: by having rich, privileged people sit around endlessly discussing social theories with one another.
I can't help but feel that Tolstoy squandered his generous allotment of pages, making very poor choices about what to include in them and what to elide. So much that I would have wanted to see in the narrative, he skipped, despite having hundreds and hundreds of pages to work with; while things I really can't be made to care at all about, such as grouse hunts, have chapter upon endless chapter devoted to them.
This is not to say that Anna Karenina doesn't have moments that sing to me; and I'm sure many of my thoughtful and brilliant friends who enjoy this book could say "well, what about ____?" and I would have to admit that yes, ____ was handled beautifully and was one of the high points of the book. But on the whole, Anna Karenina has been for me a tiresome and unsatisfying read.
Well, I don't know the answer. All I know is that for me, Anna Karenina was a tiresome slog, and for the most part just plain boring. To the extent that it has any psychological insight into its characters, it is largely superficial. To the extent it tries to broaden its scope outside of the navels of its characters and into social issues of the day (as Middlemarch does so deftly), it does so in the most tiresome and cheapest way possible: by having rich, privileged people sit around endlessly discussing social theories with one another.
I can't help but feel that Tolstoy squandered his generous allotment of pages, making very poor choices about what to include in them and what to elide. So much that I would have wanted to see in the narrative, he skipped, despite having hundreds and hundreds of pages to work with; while things I really can't be made to care at all about, such as grouse hunts, have chapter upon endless chapter devoted to them.
This is not to say that Anna Karenina doesn't have moments that sing to me; and I'm sure many of my thoughtful and brilliant friends who enjoy this book could say "well, what about ____?" and I would have to admit that yes, ____ was handled beautifully and was one of the high points of the book. But on the whole, Anna Karenina has been for me a tiresome and unsatisfying read.