Anna Karenina

This last week I finally got around to finishing Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  In the surprisingly-robust sub-genre of suicidal adulteresses, it's head and shoulders above Flaubert's Madam Bovary, a supposedly-classic novel I despise for it general mean-spiritedness, hatred of its own characters, and dull, heavy-handed critique of the naive reader (the latter of which theme I thought was handled much earlier and better by Cervantes in Don Quixote).

I appreciated that Tolstoy, unlike Flaubert, makes Anna and Vronsky nuanced and even sympathetic, while never actually condoning their adultery; how Anna's husband Alexis is portrayed as more tragic and pathos-ridden, rather than merely pathetic; I even liked the parallel narrative of Constantine Levin, who, though he still spends way too much time serving as Tolstoy's mouth-piece on such long-irrelevant debates as the state of the peasant and Russian-farming in the 19th century, nevertheless he serves as a great demonstration of how finally marrying the love of your life (which takes up the first solid third of this monstrous novel) does not prevent problems once the honeymoon's over (the remaining two-thirds of the novel--though Levin, unlike Anna, has a happy ending).

Yet I also found Anna to be for me, personally, the most forgettable of all the Russian novels I've encountered thus far.  War and Peace was the superior Tolstoy effort, and I think I'd re-read any given Dostoyevsky before I re-read Anna.  Even now, I'm already being swept away by romance of the Channel Islands in Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea, and Anna and Levin are, as we speak, drifting from my mind.

But, maybe that's just a commentary of where I am currently in my life.  Anna Karenina is about the sad things that happen to couples after the honeymoon is over.  Far too many narratives end simply with the romantic kiss and wedding, which is what I myself still working up towards.

That is to say, Anna Karenina is a book that probably won't occupy my thoughts much while I'm single, but that I'll probably be contemplating much more once I'm not only married but the honeymoon's over.