Book # 20 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Since a new film version is coming out soon, I figured now is a good a time as any to read Anna Karenina. I had actually started reading it about a month ago but stopped 2/3 of the way through to read a couple of other books. I didn't really know anything at all about this book or Leo Tolstoy beforehand... then I read the introduction of the book... and it totally reveals how the book ends! No spoiler alert or anything. So now I've learned that I should probably read a book's introduction afterwards (I also noticed the introduction to Frankenstein did the same thing).

Despite being called Anna Karenina, the book actually has two stories that share equal space and Anna is really only in one of them. Her story is about how she falls in love with Count Vronsky and leaves her husband for him. She gets shunned from society and has to deal with it because her husband doesn't want to grant her a divorce. The alternating story is about this guy Konstantine Levin. He's also part of the upper class but prefers to live in the country. His whole story is that he proposes to a girl he loves, Kitty, she turns him down. He sulks for a few hundred pages. And then *spoiler* he proposes to her again, she accepts, they get married, have a baby, and Levin ponders a bunch of Russian political problems from the 1850's and tries to figure out the meaning of life. Around page 700 someone figures out that despite living in the same area and knowing the same people, Anna and Levin have never actually met. So they finally meet and have a nice chat.

The Anna storyline kept me interested most of the time. She's an interesting character and I'm sure people will have different opinions of her. I could see how that would make an interesting film. The Levin storyline is a bit on the boring side. There are endless discussions about Russian political and economic problems that I have no clue about. It gets a bit boring after awhile. It seems that much of the Levin story is actually based on Tolstoy's real life. So he pretty much throws in all of his political viewpoints into this story. I could care less about "the Serbian problem" or what kind of agreements landowners should make with peasants to tend to their land.

There are quite a few really good sequences, most notably the scene where Anna has a mental breakdown. That part of the book uses stream of consciousness to show her thoughts. I guess at the time this was considered pretty groundbreaking. I also liked the chapter where Levin's and Kitty's son is born. Overall it was enjoyable, but there were just a few too many political discussions that are completely irrelevant to me. Now I'll have to see the movie to compare it...

One last thing... the way Tolstoy describes Anna did not make me imagine Keira Knightley at all. Maybe I just have a bias against her, or maybe I just can't forget all of the horrible faces she made in A Dangerous Method.  A-