Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina falls in love with Count Vronsky.

Considered one of the great novels, after reading ‘Anna Karenina’ I’m not sure why. This is my first Tolstoy and while I enjoyed a couple of Dostoyevsky novels ages ago, I’m unsure whether I simply don’t care for Tolstoy or have meanwhile soured on Russian classics in general.

Though the prose might be sublime in the original, I read the Maude translation and found it fair to middling. It was bloodless and dispassionate, with a lot of telling and little showing. Nothing really seems to happen or matter, even though there are deaths and births and scandals.

There are many characters with many names, and because no-one is particularly interesting, they tended to blend together. Once nicknames were added to the mix, I really struggled at times. Add in the excessive amounts of philosophising on religion, politics, peasantry, and sundry other thoughts that occurred to Tolstoy, and it all makes for dull reading. While, at times, he displays extreme insight into people and emotions, Tolstoy will then quickly shatter the moment by shifting to different characters having an irrelevant conversation.

Characters are wracked by pointless anxieties which crop up constantly, something I found irritating rather than illuminating. And while Tolstoy states that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, I found his unhappy families all alike.

I suppose I’m glad I read it, but it really felt like one of those serialised novels where the author was paid by word. Ultimately, I didn’t care for it, and found it a slog.

It's always sad when a classic turns out to be disappointing. This book didn't work for me because it failed the two basic questions: Does anything interesting happen? and Are the characters interesting? Interesting is subjective as hell, so maybe this book hits just right for others. Foreshadowing, metaphors, and the search for happiness... nothing matters if it's boring.
At the time that this was written, perhaps an affair among the nobility might have been interesting as hell, today, not so much. The characters... I didn't like or care for any of them. Being dissatisfied with life while living in utter privilege minimizes any sympathy I might be able to muster for a character. Who is the book even about, it has 7 main characters. The titular Anna's only personality trait is being beautiful before she nukes her life and becomes unstable. Her romance is stupid because it's based on nothing. Why do they love each other? After 800+ pages, I still can't tell you. Maybe it wasn't really love, and it was infatuation because they were both beautiful. I don't even care.