A favorite book

Laura wonders idly whether the love of Anna Karenina (trans. David Magarshack, other translations are inferior and not really useful) is, well, reality-based, or whether those of us who call it a favorite have no deeper reasons than the love of Mr. Willems and IB English. I'm not going to recapitulate everything she wrote, but that's the gist of it.

My short answer is that it's really that good. It's held up through several rereadings. Did I ever reread Hard Times? Ummm, no.

(Digression: on my shelf are a couple of other translations by the same guy: The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. So you might try those. I too feel lost when trying to choose one out of several translations of a foreign author.)

As I glance at my favorite books (in the profile; when I moved to Utah, I brought my top 100), I notice a couple of newer ones that I've only read once, by Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke. All the rest are things I've picked up again and again over the years. I haven't read Anna Karenina for a couple of years, but I picked it up again the other day and it seemed really fresh to me, a cut above even the great stuff I've been reading lately. I have ten library books to read, and then I'll do it. That's a broad clue, this great staying power over almost a decade.

Anna Karenina affected me a lot personally. In 1995, when Chris Tyni killed himself, life got very weird for me. I mean, in one sense I forgot quickly, or submerged my grief beneath school and activities and instantly falling in love with every girl I met (and that particular compass swung around so much, you would've thought I was at the North Pole). In another sense it was time to be an adolescent and feel out of place. But it was also time to go home at night and stay up late writing unhappily, to lose my religion, to really bang my head against life and death and "Vanity of vanities and all is vanity."

Those are basically Levin's questions, too: "He saw death and the approach of death in everything." We read a lot of great stuff in that IB English class, but this was the one that really spoke to me: a white guy whining about how life has no meaning. I wrote confused essays about how Anna lived in a deterministic universe and she couldn't move outside the box of her inclinations because the author was controlling her (obviously, way off). I projected all of my outside concerns into that sprawling novel, and it was big enough to hold them.

I didn't understand exactly why Levin changed, why he became satisfied in Part VIII. I felt like his last epiphany was not good enough. The meaning of life was inculcated from childhood and he might as well continue in what he'd heard first? "He lived (without realizing it) by those spiritual truths that he had imbibed with his mother's milk... Now it was clear to him that he could live only thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up." I call BS on this total cop-out. But I think I did come to understand that these questions were worth wrestling down, and I understood with Levin that I shouldn't just give up on them.

I also think the book grows as you grow. Like I said, the story's big enough for a teenage boy, but it becomes a behemoth in the hands of an awake, adult reader. To take a bald-faced example, I haven't reread it as a married father of one. All that life has given me a whole new perspective on the Oblonsky crisis that begins the book, on the sacrifices and compromises anyone makes for the sake of a marriage. And what I saw fresh in those first ten chapters or so was Tolstoy nailing it, over and over.

Anyway, I say read it again.