Terry's Reviews > Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina
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In the beginning, reading Anna Karenin can feel a little like visiting Paris for the first time. You’ve heard a lot about the place before you go. Much of what you see from the bus you recognize from pictures and movies and books. You can’t help but think of the great writers and artists who have been here before you. You expect to like it. You want to like it. But you don’t want to feel like you have to like it. You worry a little that you won’t. But after a few days, you settle in, and you feel the immensity of the place opening up all around you. You keep having this experience of turning a corner and finding something beautiful that you hadn’t been told to expect or catching sight of something familiar from a surprising angle. You start to trust the abundance of the place, and your anxieties that someone else will have eaten everything up before your arrival relax. (Maybe that simile reveals more about me than I’d like.)
My favorite discovery was the three or four chapters (out of the book’s 239) devoted to, of all things, scythe mowing—chapters that become a celebratory meditation on physical labor. When I read those chapters, I felt temporarily cured of the need to have something “happen” and became as absorbed in the reading as the mowers are absorbed in their work. Of course, the book is about Anna and Vronsky and Levin and Kitty and Dolly and poor, stupid Stepan Arkadyich. It’s about their love and courtship and friendship and pride and shame and jealousy and betrayal and forgiveness and about the instable variety of happiness and unhappiness. But it’s also about mowing the grass and arguing politics and hunting and working as a bureaucrat and raising children and dealing politely with tedious company. To put it more accurately, it’s about the way that the human mind—or, as Tolstoy sometimes says, the human soul—engages each of these experiences and tries to understand itself, the world around it, and the other souls that inhabit that world. This book is not afraid to take up any part of human life because it believes that human beings are infinitely interesting and infinitely worthy of compassion. And, what I found stirring, the book’s fearlessness extends to matters of religion. Tolstoy takes his characters seriously enough to acknowledge that they have spiritual lives that are as nuanced and mysterious as their intellectual lives and their romantic lives. I knew to expect this dimension of the book, but I could not have known how encouraging it would be to dwell in it for so long.
In the end, this is a book about life, written by a man who is profoundly in love with life. Reading it makes me want to live.
My favorite discovery was the three or four chapters (out of the book’s 239) devoted to, of all things, scythe mowing—chapters that become a celebratory meditation on physical labor. When I read those chapters, I felt temporarily cured of the need to have something “happen” and became as absorbed in the reading as the mowers are absorbed in their work. Of course, the book is about Anna and Vronsky and Levin and Kitty and Dolly and poor, stupid Stepan Arkadyich. It’s about their love and courtship and friendship and pride and shame and jealousy and betrayal and forgiveness and about the instable variety of happiness and unhappiness. But it’s also about mowing the grass and arguing politics and hunting and working as a bureaucrat and raising children and dealing politely with tedious company. To put it more accurately, it’s about the way that the human mind—or, as Tolstoy sometimes says, the human soul—engages each of these experiences and tries to understand itself, the world around it, and the other souls that inhabit that world. This book is not afraid to take up any part of human life because it believes that human beings are infinitely interesting and infinitely worthy of compassion. And, what I found stirring, the book’s fearlessness extends to matters of religion. Tolstoy takes his characters seriously enough to acknowledge that they have spiritual lives that are as nuanced and mysterious as their intellectual lives and their romantic lives. I knew to expect this dimension of the book, but I could not have known how encouraging it would be to dwell in it for so long.
In the end, this is a book about life, written by a man who is profoundly in love with life. Reading it makes me want to live.
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Reading Progress
April 27, 2008
– Shelved
Started Reading
June 19, 2008
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-50 of 97 (97 new)
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Frank
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rated it 5 stars
Jun 20, 2008 08:41PM
![Frank](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1186256528p1/230898.jpg)
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![Basha1971](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1248267340p1/2541640.jpg)
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I have nothing to add to your remarks save that each character has the weight of Anna, she is the central figure that they all have some relation, distant or otherwise to.
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If you ever have your book written, please inform me and make it available for me at a buying price. thanks for your review and wonderful words.
![Shannon](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1311899324p1/5897133.jpg)
![Milou Pujol](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1511116837p1/31179343.jpg)
Another part that I simply loved is on Book 5, Chapter 14. When Levin compares married life with admiring the course of a little boat ;) Absolutly great!
![Terry](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1187980534p1/306725.jpg)
Another part that I simply loved is on Book 5, Chapter 14. When Levin compares married life with admiring the course of a little boat ;) Absolutly great!"
Yes. That's a beautiful (and wise) moment. I may need to reread this book soon... I'm starting to forget parts of it...
![Milou Pujol](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1511116837p1/31179343.jpg)
Another part that I simply loved is on Book 5, Chapter 14. When Levin compares married life with admiring the course of a little boat ;) Ab..."
Yes!!! This was my second time reading it and I discovered a lot more :-) some books have a different impact dependig your age or livings
![Ginger Ale](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1421015618p1/2157851.jpg)
(Please ignore any language mistakes since I'm not a native English speaker)
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Absolutely accurate review Terry, you were able to put in words what I feel reading it for the second time, more settled and grown up. Beautiful book, I just wish you could have read it in Russian...it so truly represents Russians, our culture, our way to see life and our struggles.
Thank you for the beautiful review!
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