Anna Karenina - Is this book any good?

Cafe Society
1

I’m reading it for the first time and I am just entering part 2(about 125 pages in).

It’s not very good, in my opinion. It just reads like an upper class soap opera for the Russian elite.

Does this book get better? Is it really just about relationships, adultery, and so forth? I was expecting a book that had a romance but was about something bigger.

The translation I am reading is recent, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

I read War and Peace, by the way. That one was the old Contance Gardner one. I liked, but did not love, War and Peace. I preferred Les Miserables and The Brothers Karamazov.

2

I really disliked it. I forget how to do a spoiler tag, but let’s just say something bad ends up happening and I hated it all so much I was cheering for it to happen.

3

The parts about agrarian reforms kept me glued to my seat.

4

I read an unabridged version that was, like most 19th century novels, extremely longwinded by modern versions. Add to that the translation was extremely dry and it’s horrendously depressing- not to spoil anything but you pretty much know there’s not going to be a sideplot about a wacky mixup halfway through.

5

There’s a good reason for that. It IS an upper class soap opera for the Russian elite.

I won’t give the ending away, but it does make sense of one of the riffs made on Mystery Science Theater’s Home Economics short.

6

This version might be okay.

7

I like it.

8

Aren’t you forgetting the part where Vronsky, Anna and Kitty have to rent an apartment together in Moscow, and Vronsky has to pretend to be gay so that their religious, conservative landlord will let them live together? :wink:

9

I liked it. But then again I’ve read War and Peace twice. And took four years of Russian in high school which enables me 40+ years later to say “I have only a pen, here it is” in Russian with confidence.:cool:

10

My understanding, and this just comes from cultural awareness, is that Anna Karenina dies from falling off a train or something?

I don’t care about spoilers.

  1. Is this correct?

  2. Does anything else interesting happen in this book?

11

Well sure, in the same way Hamlet is just an upper class soap opera for Danish royalty, or Romeo and Juliet a teen angst-o-drama.

I love AK; for me the delight of reading it lies in the lyricism of the writing and in the implacable dread of watching the hope squeezed out of Anna. If that’s soap opera, I’ll take it [recognizing of course that it’s secretly just a Russian translation of Madame Bovary].

12

If Tolstoy had created Three’s Company he’d have worked the words “stillborn” and the phrase “prisoners of their class” into the theme song.

13

I knew something was wrong with me when I sympathized more with Karenin than Anna. The only characters I cared about were him and his/Anna’s son, Seryozha.

The saddest part in the whole book for me was when, finally, Karenin started being nice to Seryozha and talking to him warmly, and Seryozha was confused – the line goes something like, “he felt like his father was talking to him as if he were some other little boy, someone very good, not like him, and he didn’t know who that little boy was but he desperately wanted to be him.”

That made me cry. Anything having to do with Anna? Pfft.

14

I’ll spoilerize this anyway, because there might be some here who don’t know the answer and don’t want to yet.

  1. Close, but she didn’t fall. She deliberately stepped in front of a moving train while at a station, and so committed suicide.

  2. No. But I suppose that’s a subjective call on my part.

15

I hated the end.

To me, it felt like the story ended long before the words did. I knew what happened to the major characters. I knew what happened to the minor ones. Things were well and truly wrapped up. And then there seemed like 8 million more chapters of Levin who just isn’t interesting enough to carry a storyline all on his own at that point of the book.But yes, until the very end, it was good.

16

I just checked out the very same book last week! Since I read in snatches I don’t expect to finish it actually…

I’m liking it so far, but Anna has not yet arrived on the scene.

17

Put it in a spoiler box – it’s been a while since I’ve seen that one.

18

I saw this thread, and assumed there’d be spoilers, so I picked up the book and got a good chunk of it read before I opened the thread.

So my only question is: I’m over halfway through Anna Karenikova, and she hasn’t been in one tennis game yet.

19

This was exactly how I felt about the book! Ok, I didn’t totally hate the side romance that actually worked out, but I can’t remember the characters names though.

I really, really detest book characters who get themselves into their own messes and then blame fate/the universe/everyone else for their screwed up lives. (yup, Madam Bovary is also on my never read again list. blech.)

20

No.