Okay, so maybe most of you have already read this novel. Because it is a classic, because you went to college, because Oprah featured it on her book club.
But if I’m not the only person in the world who just jumped on the Tolstoy train (ha-ha) — I implore you, read it. Once you get over the long, confusing names (get an edition with a character list!), I assure you: you will love this book. Anna Karenina is a tragic, emotionally complicated narrative of family politics and spiritual awakening.
In a word? It’s awesome.
If that isn’t enough to pique your interest, here are a few more reasons why you’ll love this book:
1) The subway factor
I live in New York City, where there is an underground culture of who-can-impress-his-or-her-fellow-subway-readers-more. Like many other books — The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Remembrance of Things Past, Encyclopedia Britannica — Anna Karenina will make you look smart and cultured on the subway. Unlike many other books, it will also be FUN TO READ. This is important, because it will ensure that you actually take your ear-buds out of your ears, turn off your i-Whatever, and read the damn thing.
2) The characters… they’re just like you!
If you are a human being on Planet Earth, you have surely seen US Magazine’s “Just Like Us” feature, which showcases photos of celebrities doing impossibly normal things like drinking Starbucks lattes in sweatpants, dropping their intolerably cute children off at pre-school, and picking their wedgies on Malibu beaches. Spoiler alert: Leo Tolstoy’s characters do not drink Starbucks lattes. They do, however, do all the same stupid things that you (okay, I) do on a regular basis — they are passive-aggressive and second-guess themselves and say things that they didn’t mean to, and then they apologize for saying such things in a way that doesn’t sound like an apology at all. Plus, not one of the characters is static. They change in weird and unexpected ways; and while you understand their motivations for doing what they do, they still manage (like the real people in your life) to surprise you, in ways good and bad, throughout the novel.
Plus, as an aspiring fiction writer (aspiring in the same way that an alcoholic drinking one bourbon a night instead of 17 might say that he’s “recovering”), I’m so amazingly in awe of the way that Tolstoy develops his characters and yet still moves the plot along. That deserves an exclamation point: he develops his characters fully, and still moves the plot along!
3) Tolstoy knows that you are fucked up, but he still loves you
Tolstoy has a shitload of empathy for his characters. He loves them. He is in love with them (especially the hero of the novel, Konstantin Levin, who is modeled after Tolstoy himself — hey, we’ve all got a bit of Narcissus in us). Tolstoy understands what it is to be human — that is to say, miserable, ecstatic, understanding, two-faced, deceptive, insecure, irrational, desirous, happy, unhappy, passionate, uncertain, nice, mean, pretentious, misunderstood. He slides in and out of the perspective of every character in the novel, from Anna K herself to Konstantin Levin’s hunting dog, and he does it believably, and with grace.
4) You’ll turn the last page, and want to start again
Believe me, I’m not one of those people who always does this. In fact, I normally hate people who claim to do this. It seems like they’re one-upping you, doesn’t it? You tell them you finally got through Middlemarch; they tell you that they got through it twice. Whatever. (I think the last book I claimed to read multiple times was Lois Lowry’s The Giver, which is an excellent book, if you haven’t read it… but which also is written for sixth-graders).
Anyway, take my word for it: you’ll want to read Anna Karenina again, if for no other reason that that this time around, you’ll actually know who the characters are from the get-go.
