It is that good! Tolstoy’s language is brilliant and it really makes me ache to close the book after a few chapters. Or is it that classics are so well acclaimed that we do not mind plodding through the whole book? Maybe we (specially me) are less patient while reading a contemporary novel.Īnna Karenina will definitely be a 4.5 or 5 star read for me. Is it that we expect a slower unfolding of the story when we pick a classic but are too impatient to humour the same style in contemporary novelists? I do not know.

Excellent portrayal of emotions and confusions.

I did pick up Pamuk’s book (which by the way is an extraordinary one defining who the novelist is and who the reader is) and finished reading it with a clearer perspective. It took me two years to fulfil that urge and here I am, currently reading Part 6 of Anna Karenina. Pamuk keeps referencing Tolstoy’s Anna that I stopped reading the lectures because it gave rise to an urge to pick up this Russian classic. The truth is, I picked up Anna Karenina, two years after reading a chapter (or two?) of Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, a series of lectures on the craft of writing and essence of a novel. Though I did not find the political talk boring, the passages on agriculture, ploughing, horses etc were not enjoyable for me. Levin, a major character in Anna Karenina, has his POV strewn with agricultural and political references. The classics-reader in me is a patient little girl the new-releases reader in me is definitely not. Anna does not make an appearance until about fifty pages after.

We start the story with Anna’s sister in law and the problems in her family. I do not read new releases that are this huge in case you are wondering. Knowing my fear of big books, it is surprising that I decided to read it. But maybe if this book was written by a present-day author, I might have second thoughts about reading it mainly because of three reasons.

Tolstoy stole my heart within a few chapters and I keep going back to the passages I have already read imagining the world in which Anna lived. I would not have picked up Anna Karenina if it was a 2017 release. Before you think that I am going to blatantly criticize a classic, allow me to say that I am currently reading (currently? I have been ‘currently reading’ it for the last three months).

Anna karenina book buy