Friday, September 26, 2008

Anna Karenina Update

I started reading Anna Karenina weeks ago, and I loved it. Loved the characters, their struggles, and the translation. Then I read the last sentence, and I was left speechless. I felt (and still feel) robbed and betrayed. How can one line of an eight hundred page book ruin the whole thing? Tolstoy delved into so many great questions and then gave me that answer? That's no answer! That's a trite band-aid to cover the fact that the questions he raised are still agonizingly, achingly unanswered.

I suppose it takes a good author to make me care enough about their story to be unsatisfied when their characters are unsatisfied instead of just dumping their unsatisfied characters back into the library drop box.

1 comment:

ks said...

Yep, I guess that pretty much describes Russian literature. :o) That's why Daniel hates it. I have a love-hate relationship with most of it. I do love dostevsky though. Tolstoy, not so much.