April 2010 Archives

The Houston Central Market Book Club met six days ago (April 12, 2010) so I thought I'd better start writing soon or else I will totally forget the things I want to say about our discussion on ANNA KARENINA by Tolstoy. I probably will forget lots of things anyway but that hopefully will be a good thing and prevent me from writing such a long blog on the subject.

One thing I definitely haven't forgotten and probably won't is that Jackie was a great moderator for this discussion. Given the facts that the book was 800 plus pages long and that there were twenty attendees including three new members also increased the skill required for moderating the group but Jackie handled it very well.

One of the primary themes of discussion was of course Tolstoy's portrayal of Anna - was he sympathetic to her problems? what were her problems? how did they differ from the problems Vronsky, her lover encountered as a result of their affair? how did the way Anna dealt with her problems differ from how Levin dealt with being disappointed in love, at least at first?

Considering the stature of ANNA KARENINA as a masterpiece in world literature, much has been written about all of this and more on the web. Because ANNA KARENINA was an Oprah's Book Club selection several years ago, this means that those of us interested in reading what the world thought about the book had even more material to help in forming our opinions. But in our book club, which is affiliated with Great Books, we discourage bringing in outside sources, at least during the main part of our discussion. We try to arrive at our own conclusions without help from outside reviewers.

If any attendee has read the outside reviews, and of course I'm sure there were several who did, we ask that they present the ideas as their own and more importantly, be prepared to defend the ideas in their own words, not always an easy thing.

As I'm writing this, I haven't yet explored the web for literary opinions. I plan to do that but I wanted to finish this write-up first so I wouldn't be tempted to include ideas not covered in our discussion here. My first reaction to the discussion was my amazement that we had such a good turnout given that most of the attendees are people who work outside the home and some even with children at home. I was impressed that there was so much interest in reading literature of great quality and stature.

One of my questions and comments during the discussion was my observation that Tolstoy spends quite a bit of time at the beginning of the story introducing Stiva, who is Anna's brother. I was a bit impatient waiting for Anna to come on the scene. I wonder if this might have been one of Tolstoy's reasons for this technique, which causes the reader to endure the suspense before they can finally "see" Anna. One viewpoint from the group about this point explained that the verbage about Stiva and his wife Dolly was also necessary to set up the story as it depicts the happiness or unhappiness of the main characters or couples, i.e. Stiva and Dolly versus Anna and Vonsky versus Levin and Kitty.

We talked about the descriptions of the different forms of passion that can be applied to all the main characters in these relationships. Stiva had no self-control and felt no inclination to feel any guilt about his affairs or even to try to change despite how much it hurt his wife. Dolly was worn out and disappointed in dealing time after time with Stiva's affairs but remained tied to the marriage in the end because of her children. Levin, though tempted on a couple of occasions including once with Anna, because of his dedication to his work was able to keep from following Stiva's example. In fact, Levin seems not to understand Stiva's propensity for extravagant spending and womanizing. We all agreed that "Levin versus Stiva" was another metaphor for the "traditional versus liberal" and "Moscow versus Petersburg" and "country versus city" dichotomies.

We all seemed to agree that the inclusion of "women's issues" by Tolstoy was definitely present though we didn't come to any conclusion about to what extent the treatment by Tolstoy was similar to modern feminism. Given the time the book was written and the culture of Tolstoy's Russia, we thought it certainly was a sign of advanced thinking regarding the inclusion of intelligent, educated, aristocratic women being bored along with the depiction of a double standard leading to a difference in how Vronsky suffered from the affair versus how Anna suffered as a result.

An aspect to the same issue was that Anna, unlike Levin had no activity that could help her keep her mind on constructive activity. Her isolation from her friends in society was imposed on her because of her separation from her husband Alexei. Vronsky felt no such repercussions and was able to be part of political events and his hospital charity without any concern that he would be ostracized as Anna was in the scene where she ventured to the theatre with her Aunt. Though Tolstoy doesn't allow his description of Anna to be totally sympathetic because he paints her as blaming Vronsky unfairly for things that aren't his fault. He also shows her using her high degree of beauty and charm to dally cruelly with the feelings of Levin, no matter how brief. He paints her as a character deeply conflicted because of her basically having to choose between the love of her son versus the love of Vronsky.

We talked about the religious theme and how many of the characters whom the author depicted sympathetically chose to practice their religion differently. The main example of this was Levin and his wife Kitty. Levin who initially was an unbeliever but who was converted during the course of the story chose to practice in a way that was different from the more traditional religious practice of his young wife but from what we could tell, this wasn't necessarily a negative difference. Instead Tolstoy was using this as an example of how we are all different. The complex descriptions of the characters and especially their mental thoughts and the process by which they came to conclusions and decided to act or not act was exceptionally rich and a pleasure to read. As someone mentioned, Tolstoy even tells us what is going on inside the mind of Levin's dog when he is hunting and taking directions from Levin.

We discussed many other characters, themes, incidents and conclusions in the book. I am happy to report that in my opinion, we covered the major elements fairly well. From what I could tell, others agreed with my conclusion. I was pleasantly surprised that we could do such a good job and a satisfying one of talking about such a complex literary masterpiece within the 2 hour limit (minus a few minutes for conclusions as we go around the table the last time).

At the end of the discussion, we elected a new slate of titles for July thru December. I'll be posting those soon at www.houstonbookclubs.org Looking forward to our next discussion on May 10, 2010 of SURFACING by Margaret Atwood.

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