Anna Karenina, Parts I-III.
Jan. 8th, 2006 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtran_Anna Karenina_ is one of those things that I didn't like at all until I did, and then suddenly I liked it a lot.
It still remains right on the edge of my reading interest. I have to be in just the right mood to read it, and it's certainly not the sort of book I could ever imagine writing. When everything clicks though, it can be a wonderous thing. I feel after reading it that I've lived a dozen lives and been shown things that normal people aren't allowed to see.
From a writing perspective, the thing that strikes me most is the way Tolstoy strips away all unneeded complexity. I know that's a strange thing to say about an 800 page novel, but it does make sense in a funny sort of way. The breadth of the story is huge, but the way he handles it is by teasing out threads one at a time. Each time he introduces new characters or plots, he gives less information than he could, sometimes the minimum possible. At times this distillation is remarkable to the point of genius. Time and time again, new information will arrive about a character and the effect will be to multiply the reader's understanding rather than to supplant it.
It reminds me a little of the way Bach might spin out a simple melody - gradually added more complexity and meaning, while maintaining the integrity of the music the whole time. Faced with a story a fraction as detailed and complex as Anna Karenina, I would probably be convinced that there was no simple way into the story - that the only way was to feed the reader different parts of background one by one until they had enough to click together to form a whole. How could I possibly show the families and the complex characters without all their contradictions right from the start? How could I tolerate the reader seeing the characters and not having a full inkling of the depth behind them?
Then, of course, are the glorious Tolstoy set pieces - the ball scenes and the horse races, Levin mowing with the peasants and Anna and Vronsky in the Petersburg salons. These are easy to mimic (and dangerously easy to accidentally plagiarise), but nearly impossible to duplicate. There's a breath in these scenes that goes beyond simple description. They are more like avatars. The ball scene invokes a hundred other balls, a salon scene speaks of all the countless salons that the participants have been to.
Structurally, there's also the way that Tolstoy leaves an extra layer free above the story for the reader to draw their own connections between the threads. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes less so. But each time, there is always the feeling -- ah, yes, he meant for me to see this. Ah, yes, I understand now.
It still remains right on the edge of my reading interest. I have to be in just the right mood to read it, and it's certainly not the sort of book I could ever imagine writing. When everything clicks though, it can be a wonderous thing. I feel after reading it that I've lived a dozen lives and been shown things that normal people aren't allowed to see.
From a writing perspective, the thing that strikes me most is the way Tolstoy strips away all unneeded complexity. I know that's a strange thing to say about an 800 page novel, but it does make sense in a funny sort of way. The breadth of the story is huge, but the way he handles it is by teasing out threads one at a time. Each time he introduces new characters or plots, he gives less information than he could, sometimes the minimum possible. At times this distillation is remarkable to the point of genius. Time and time again, new information will arrive about a character and the effect will be to multiply the reader's understanding rather than to supplant it.
It reminds me a little of the way Bach might spin out a simple melody - gradually added more complexity and meaning, while maintaining the integrity of the music the whole time. Faced with a story a fraction as detailed and complex as Anna Karenina, I would probably be convinced that there was no simple way into the story - that the only way was to feed the reader different parts of background one by one until they had enough to click together to form a whole. How could I possibly show the families and the complex characters without all their contradictions right from the start? How could I tolerate the reader seeing the characters and not having a full inkling of the depth behind them?
Then, of course, are the glorious Tolstoy set pieces - the ball scenes and the horse races, Levin mowing with the peasants and Anna and Vronsky in the Petersburg salons. These are easy to mimic (and dangerously easy to accidentally plagiarise), but nearly impossible to duplicate. There's a breath in these scenes that goes beyond simple description. They are more like avatars. The ball scene invokes a hundred other balls, a salon scene speaks of all the countless salons that the participants have been to.
Structurally, there's also the way that Tolstoy leaves an extra layer free above the story for the reader to draw their own connections between the threads. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes less so. But each time, there is always the feeling -- ah, yes, he meant for me to see this. Ah, yes, I understand now.
