I've FINALLY finished Anna Karenina! It was well worth it, at least--but what a labour!
Again, I did enjoy it. The density and the thoroughness of the storytelling is an astounding feat of writing. Tolstoy really understood human behaviour, I think, and really gloried in delving into people's motivations. Don't get me wrong: if you're expecting a book like this to fly by like a Stieg Larsson novel, you know nothing about 19th century Russian literature. It most certainly isn't the kind of tome you can devour over a lazy long weekend. It's density is something you experience rather than burn through. You taste it, savour it, and let it gather itself in your mind's eye. That's where its genius lies. That is why it is worth reading.
Unfortunately, my copy was a cheap Wordsworth edition I got when I was 11 years old on sale for peanuts at a Coles Book store. This shouldn't be a problem really (I'm quite partial to cheap books, in fact!) but I get the feeling there are better translations out there. Not only that, but the editing was terrible. It was so fraught with errors that it was actually kind of amusing. Typos everywhere. In several cases punctuation was simply overlooked. Things were misspelt. One man, whose name for most of the book is Koznyshev, was mentioned in two places on the same page late in the book as "Kozushev". My favourite though was when the word "help" was spelled "he]p".
And since spring hit I've been in the mood for something more fanciful. Fantastical, you might even say. My co-worker lent me a book of essays contributed by different fantasy writers, about the work of Tolkien and its influence on them. This has been whetting my appetite for some damn good summer escapism. It's also reminding me where my roots are.
It's funny because that word, "escapism", is tacked onto The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and most fantasy for that matter, as if it were a bad thing; and yet if I could pinpoint when and where I became opened up to the world in a completely new way it would be upon the reading of these books. It introduced me to a vast number of subjects of interest, bodies of knowledge and experiences like no other work has singlehandedly done before. It's no exaggeration to say that through reading Lord of the Rings I gained a deeper appreciation for nature; Tolkien's love of what is green and good was ignited in myself. As well as the beginnings of an increased ecological consciousness, It opened me up to Norse, Celtic, and Classic myth, and from there, religion, philosophy, astronomy, and western literature and literary theory.
And then there are the languages! Tolkien's linguistic background seeps into every corner of his world, and it spilled into mine. I tried to create my own Elvish language, and got considerably far, for a twelve year-old. I had a lexicon, a grammar, an alphabet. I even tried to teach myself Latin for a couple of years. I have no doubt that this love for language inspired by Tolkien helped me greatly as I went into French immersion in junior high. I never picked up a rock album until I learned that some of Led Zeppelin's songs were directly inspired by Lord of the Rings. I never knew rock was that versatile, and about something other than sex, and drugs or whatever those kids were listening to.
Perhaps I would have gotten interested in these things on my own without Tolkien's influence, but the point is I didn't. His work was the doorway I stepped through. Above all else it sharpened my sense of wonder, and I like to think that it is always strengthened upon returning to it. Escapism? Hah! If anything, I was escaping
into the world! But I digress...
Next up on my roster is The Half-Blood Prince. It's been a few years since it came out, my sister has always nagged me about reading it, so now that the second part of the Deathly Hallows is imminent, it seems like the right time to start on it. I'll try to get through it and the Deathly Hallows in the next 30 days or so. Wish me luck!
