At the tender and wily age of twelve, my grandmother asked me on the phone what book I was reading at that moment. Always a fan of obtuse literary jokes that I pretended to understand, I casually replied, "War and Peace."
"Oh my," she said. "That's a big one."
"Yeah, you know," I yawned.
Of course, I was not reading War and Peace and had no intention of doing so, and even today I don't know why, as a sixth-grader, I would think it funny or even worthwhile to make a joke about a book that I had probably only ever heard referenced on Wishbone. Suffice to say, I was always a weird kid. I forgot about the whole thing until a week later when my eleven-year-old cousin and I were visiting my grandmother at her house. With the same forced air of pre-teen literary ennui, he heaved down onto the kitchen table a hardback copy of War and Peace with a bookmark nestled about 25 pages in.
"Isn't this wonderful?" my grandmother asked me. "Your cousin heard that you were reading War and Peace and he decided that he should too!"
Needless to say, I was immediately racked by a burden of Raskolnikov-sized guilt. I felt that I'd been caught in a shameful web of deceit. My crime haunted me at night; I thought I'd never be able to face my grandmother again. I tried to forget about it, but I made the mistake of mentioning it to my mother a few days later.
"You told her what? Why would you do that?" she asked. I had no answers. "Well, you need to call her and tell her the truth."
So I did, I called my grandmother and confessed to the garish lie. I was not reading War and Peace. I was very sorry that this misunderstanding had caused my cousin, seized by a sense competitiveness so pure and transparent that it could only occur within the claustrophobic confines of a family, to waste his time trying to read this awful book.
Ever since then, Tolstoy has loomed large and statuesque in my mind, more like an abstract law of physics than an author I would ever actually want to sit down and read. I'm not sure what caused me to suddenly change my mind and pick up a copy of Anna Karenina last winter. Might have been my love of Dostoyevsky, or all the good press that the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation has received. And lest we discredit the "if Oprah can do it, then I can too" mentality.
As of page 176, I've found that Anna Karenina is the opposite of the dense and inaccessable Tolstoy of my childhood imagination: it's so incredibly readable and fluid that I can't put it down. The way Tolstoy moves so swiftly through the consciousnesses of a bunch of different characters is what amazes me most. There are no minor characters in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy fleshes out each of his characters beautifully with human complexities and contradictions. I think I like Levin best right now because I find myself sympathizing with him most, but we'll see what happens as I keep reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment