Reading "Anna Karenina"

I put off Tolstoy's novel for years, but I finally had to find out: Is it truly one of the greatest books ever written?

By James Hynes

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July 11, 2005 | When you wait as long as I did to read "Anna Karenina" for the first time -- I'll be 50 in August -- there's no way you can come to it without any preconceptions. For one thing, I already knew the famous first line ("All happy families are alike," blah blah blah), and for another, I already knew how it ends (Anna, train). And I had a rough idea of what happens in between -- that the title character is a beautiful Russian aristocrat who leaves her chilly, older husband for the dashing Count Vronsky, and that their scandalous love affair is juxtaposed with the fraught courtship and marriage of the anxious Levin and the innocent young Kitty. I knew that Levin was basically Tolstoy, and that Tolstoy, like Levin, was torn his whole life between the profane and the sacred. And I knew from the very first time I ever hefted a copy that "Anna Karenina" is a really, really long book.

So I'd never quite gotten around to it. I had an old Signet edition for years, back when Signets had tissuey pages and smudgy type, and a few years back I read the first 50 pages or so on an airplane. The main thing I took away from that attempt, though, was the realization that I needed bifocals. Then, last year, my agent, who was just about to publish his own first novel, told me that "Anna Karenina" was his favorite book, and I promised him I'd read it for sure, along with his.

"Read mine first," he said. "I don't want you reading my book after you've just read Tolstoy."

In the meantime that fat, smudgy Signet had vanished, so I bought a new copy, a World's Classic from Oxford, a stout little hardcover. But the print in that one was too small even for bifocals, and finally I invested in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from Penguin -- it's Oprah-rific! -- and a brand new pair of reading glasses. And just last month I settled into my sofa, worked out the proper distance to hold the damn book from my geriatric new glasses, and started reading.

And wouldn't you know it, this particular new experience, like everything else that's new in midlife, has turned out to be both predictably melancholy and unexpectedly rewarding. Melancholy, because that pure joy of discovering a great novel on your own (the way I discovered "Lord Jim" when I was 10 years old) is greatly diluted by the fact that I'm denied the simple narrative pleasure of not knowing how the story turns out. And there's another reason: Just as you'll never fall in love again the way you did the first time, you'll never read a great novel at 49 in the wholehearted way you would have read it at 20, if only because so much life, and so many books, have happened in the meantime. The younger me would have been more credulous, perhaps, would have taken the novel's reputation as a masterpiece -- maybe even as the masterpiece -- at face value. The younger Jim would perhaps have read the book more meticulously than the older Jim just did, especially those long and frankly tedious passages where Levin -- who has to be the most painfully self-conscious character in literature; he makes Stephen Daedalus seem like Mike Hammer -- agonizes over, I dunno, the Slavic question, whatever that is. Jim Jr. at least would have paid closer attention to the footnote explaining exactly what the Slavic question is, while Jim Sr. just sighed and peeked ahead to see how many pages there were before we got back to Anna and the good stuff (and I say this as a Slav -- I'm half Serbian).

The older me is a little more world-weary and streetwise: OK, Mr. Big Shot, Mr. Canonical Masterpiece, Mr. Greatest Fucking Novel Ever Written -- what makes you so hot? Bring it on. And here's the rewarding part -- you saw this coming, right? -- the rewarding part is that the book does bring it, after all. I don't believe in fate, and I don't even believe that you're meant to read certain books at certain points in your life, but I do believe that you have to be ready for a great book if it comes along. The younger me might have read the more pedantic passages of "Anna Karenina" more meticulously, but he would have read the magnificent set pieces of domestic life with less understanding than I did.

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