Agora Road Book Club: Anna Karenina Edition

[Junious]

*Screws up his eyes*
The thing about Anna Karenina is it would best be discussed in real time with a weekly reading assignment. It's just too massive to leave posts hanging and expect people to jump in. It's also a dense book, that required intense focus on my part. Did any of you get to the part with the fatboy in the scotch cap that's chatting up all the ladies? I think he was my favorite character lol. I saw different aspects of myself in all three of the male protagonists. I want to be a Levin, I saw myself as Vronsky in my younger days, but really I was mostly just Oblonsky'ing along. Anyone else find themselves relating to the characters in this way? Also, Kitty's time in the rehab was intensely familiar to me and makes me think that the more things change the more they stay the same, at least in regards to psych rehab.
Honi suit qui mal y pense
I found the midpoint of the line between Anna Karenina and Heart of Darkness, a novel called "Black Mischief" by Evelyn Waugh.

 

[zalaz alaza]

*Screws up his eyes*
The thing about Anna Karenina is it would best be discussed in real time with a weekly reading assignment. It's just too massive to leave posts hanging and expect people to jump in. It's also a dense book, that required intense focus on my part. Did any of you get to the part with the fatboy in the scotch cap that's chatting up all the ladies? I think he was my favorite character lol. I saw different aspects of myself in all three of the male protagonists. I want to be a Levin, I saw myself as Vronsky in my younger days, but really I was mostly just Oblonsky'ing along. Anyone else find themselves relating to the characters in this way? Also, Kitty's time in the rehab was intensely familiar to me and makes me think that the more things change the more they stay the same, at least in regards to psych rehab.
Honi suit qui mal y pense
I found the midpoint of the line between Anna Karenina and Heart of Darkness, a novel called "Black Mischief" by Evelyn Waugh.

can honestly say i did not really relate to any of the protagonists in the novel except in the worry that i embody their flaws

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

Around Page 800, just came here to say that I've read enough of AK to say that Toradora is a better love story that MOGS Anna Karenina in everyway (Except for Taiga's CRINGE atheism speech) and its not even close.

Also, the book schedule I set up is sort of obsolete by this point. I'll give it a couple morr weeks so everyone finishes the novel.

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

>Be Tolstoy novel.
>Be around page 870.
>Pregnant princess is suddenly ill.

OH FUCK OH NO KITTY BROS IT CANT END LIKE THIS

Spoiler: Kitty autism

Ok so she survived. TOLSTOY WHAT THE FUCK. Mf goes from daily dose of 30-page farm AUTISM to fucking playing with my heartstrings like my psychiatrist. Fuck that Kitty is gonna die guys just you wait, so so intense I swear to God it was one or the best things I've ever read. Shrills went down my body. I was ready to cry manly tears. How can this old man get away with this?

Happy to know Kitty made it out alive though. She's not gonna die in the last 200 pages... Right? RIGHT

 

[Deleted member 4436]

Around Page 800, just came here to say that I've read enough of AK to say that Toradora is a better love story that MOGS Anna Karenina in everyway (Except for Taiga's CRINGE atheism speech) and its not even close.

>Be Tolstoy novel.
>Be around page 870.
>Pregnant princess is suddenly ill.

Okay so I'm also around page 800, but my copy only goes up to about 900 pages. I guess we're at the exact same point it seems. Since I'm 9/10 of the way through the book, I'm beginning to see just how much I've been filtered honestly. It still doesn't seem to me like anything has really happened. Like, this is my favorite book, no doubt, but I don't really get why. If this is one of the best novels of all time, then that seems somewhat concerning to me. Surely, this isn't the peak, right?

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

Okay so I'm also around page 800, but my copy only goes up to about 900 pages. I guess we're at the exact same point it seems. Since I'm 9/10 of the way through the book, I'm beginning to see just how much I've been filtered honestly. It still doesn't seem to me like anything has really happened. Like, this is my favorite book, no doubt, but I don't really get why. If this is one of the best novels of all time, then that seems somewhat concerning to me. Surely, this isn't the peak, right?

I dont think this is peak. The most peak I've read is probably Blood Meridian, Mobby Dick and Brothers K. Though I haven't read the classics yet

 

[zalaz alaza]

To me, I think the obvious answer to why this is considered one of the greatest novels of all time is that tolstoy was a part of the nobility in russia that had a fairly benevolent approach to the peasantry. if these things weren't true I imagine Anna Karenina would have lost itself with the rest of the content of the periodicals it was published in initially.
i have, however, decided to finish the novel with you all. apologies for my faltering commitment to this.

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

To me, I think the obvious answer to why this is considered one of the greatest novels of all time is that tolstoy was a part of the nobility in Russia that had a fairly benevolent approach to the peasantry. if these things weren't true I imagine Anna Karenina would have lost itself with the rest of the content of the periodicals it was published in initially.
I have, however, decided to finish the novel with you all. apologies for my faltering commitment to this.

Honestly, a lot of times what gets into the literary canon seems to depend on sociological luck, as the author belongs to the privileged class (In terms of the classes who decide what good literature is) or happens to be at the right place at the right time and touches a theme that the lit intelligencia likes. Rn, in Costa Rica that's how it seems that you get lit recognition, talk about a topic critics like.

And thats how we get mid tier novels (at best) like F451 shoved into the canon. Though AK is way better than F451, I still dont get whats so great about it overall, it has some great parts but a lot of it just feels to me like fluff.

Thats another issue we have today. I feel like we're at the end of canons, since the elite we have entrusted with validating what good literature is feels so out of touch that they're not worth trusting anymore. After the old guard of American writers die off, who will be even worth reading at that point? Whoever, is the next big lit writer propped uo by the university elite will probably just be a sham.

Which makes me think, that thanks to the populist nature of the internet, in the coming decades/centuries, we'll probably develop diverging literary canons akin to how different countries have their own canon. We'll still get the stuff that's considered smart in college, but we could see websites like /lit/ have their own different version of whats considered worth reading, for example.

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

I'm beginning to see just how much I've been filtered honestly. It still doesn't seem to me like anything has really happened.

A couple of things have happened and there has been some important character development, I think the issue I have is that what has happened is so little compared to the lenght of the book. I feel like it could've easily been trimmed down to half it's lenght. But we need another farming politics scene guys!

People point out that Levin is Tolstoy's self insert. But Levin is nearing fanfiction levels of self-insert. Of course he's a very smart and well written self insert, I mean it like how Tolstoy will devote chapters upon chapters talking about topics that have little relevance to the plot just because it's a topic Tolstoy wants to talk about, it really reminds me of when zoomer authors drop the narrative to talk about how asexuality is so important you guys.

The novel should've been called, in the spirit of War and Peace, Farming and Divorce.

 

[№56]

I've finally finished Part 6 and am starting to get really tired of Vronsky's shit. He was a more or less sympathetic character up until the Italy episode, but after that the man has done nothing but move from one self-absorbed LARP to the next (artist, modern landlord, politician, etc.) while ignoring Anna the entire time. Tostoy is really leaning into the "Goofus and Gallant" approach to comparing their relationship to Levin and Kitty's in these last couple sections, especially when showing how one couple openly argues and talks about their problems while the other tries to cover everything up. The shooting expedition and the provincial election were my two favorite episodes in this section. The latter reminded me of reading about electoral politics in the U.S. during the Civil War era (only a decade before AK) and not understanding anything - Levin's confusion depression over all the politicking was very relatable.

Honestly, a lot of times what gets into the literary canon seems to depend on sociological luck, as the author belongs to the privileged class (In terms of the classes who decide what good literature is) or happens to be at the right place at the right time and touches a theme that the lit intelligencia likes. Rn, in Costa Rica that's how it seems that you get lit recognition, talk about a topic critics like.

I think it makes more sense to think of "the western canon" as a list of influential books than a list of good ones. That's not to say "canonical" books aren't good - most of them are - but that the only way a book can become canonical is as a result of a lot of people reading it over a long enough period of time (100+ years). There's a strong correlation with quality but influence and relevance are the ultimate deciding factors, and no one person or group of people really gets the final say over what manages to reach that level of extreme long-term popularity. There are plenty of books I really like that I don't consider to be canonical, and a number of books that I don't like that I would still put on my western canon list because of the influence they've had. I don't think it makes sense to talk about books "deserving" to be canonical or to try and force certain books in or out of the canon (like Harold Bloom did). Either something is still influential a century after it was written or it isn't.
The value of reading the canon doesn't come from it being a 100% guaranteed best books of all time list, it comes from the fact that you're going to be participating in long series of various reactions to the same works of art. Even if you end up hating Shakespeare, for instance, you can still find many people over the past 400 years who have a similar opinion (the reviews Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary are a good example of this.) That's what makes Shakespeare part of the canon, not the fact that he was a good playwright or the fact that somebody wrote his name on a list of canonical authors.

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

TOLSTOY BROWSES POL CONFIRMED

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

Ok, I finished AK yesterday. After reading the final chapter, I can now say that it is better than Toradora...

Will probably write a long effort post, there's just so much to get through since I dropped discussing the novel after chapter 5 lol. Only @zalaz alaza is yet to finish the novel right? On what part are you on?

 

[zalaz alaza]

Ok, I finished AK yesterday. After reading the final chapter, I can now say that it is better than Toradora...

Will probably write a long effort post, there's just so much to get through since I dropped discussing the novel after chapter 5 lol. Only @zalaz alaza is yet to finish the novel right? On what part are you on?

part 5. ill keep choogling tho

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

Anna Karenina bros... How can we recover?

 

[№56]

Part 7 chapters 13-16 are the absolute high point of the book. If you only read four chapters of Anna Karenina, make them these four chapters.

 

[Deleted member 4436]

Part 8 was a lot like what I was expecting the whole book to be like. The ultimate message I got from it, that being, "there is no revelation which will magically change how you behave socially" really resonated for me, and I was in quite a long period of bliss for a couple days after finishing the novel. I picked the book hoping we could talk more about things such as that, though I wasn't really expecting that amount of "filler". While I was first making a lot of notes while reading, the amount of seemingly nothing happening threw me out of that. Regardless, I really did enjoy the book, and I want to capture this kind of style for the novel I'm writing.

While rather eccentric, one of Truman Capote's main methods of practicing writing was to re-write entire novels by hand. I'm going to try this out myself, and push myself to do so at least until the end of part 1. Hopefully, this revisiting will give me a bit more to say about the book than what I can think of at the moment.

 

[№56]

Well, I did it. I finished Anna Karenina.
I was kind of disappointed by part 8 at first, it's not what I expected from the conclusion of a 963-page epic novel. I was hoping for some kind of epilogue to Anna and Vronsky's story - maybe the other characters talk about her at the funeral and we get a summing up of her character where somebody says something like "in the end, she really was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy" - but that doesn't happen at all. Vronsky goes off to die in Serbia and Anna is only mentioned once, in passing. It's almost like Tolstoy was sick of both Anna, Vronsky, and Karenin by the end of part 7 and decided to devote all the space in the conclusion that would have gone towards them to the war in the Balkans (the Current Thing in 1877) instead. On the other hand, the fact that the book ends with a series of references to pan-Slavism and Russian support for Serbia strengthens my theory that AK managed to predict WWI and the Russian revolution in a weird way.
Levin's religious conversion was what saved the ending for me. Tolstoy's argument for the existence of God was convincing and well-written, and it was also a good conclusion to Levin's character arc. It reminded me of the overpowering transcendent feeling of goodness Karenin gets when he decides to forgive Anna earlier in the book. Unlike Karenin, Levin is able to hold onto this feeling and prevent it from being subverted by what he comes up against in everyday life. I think the difference between the two characters lies in the fact that Karenin thinks of his experience as a special, once in a lifetime thing (he's a good guy, but he is arrogant and narrow-minded), while Levin is able to see that this goodness is something that's always been present both in the world around him and in himself. It's a conclusion that fits really well with AK's episodic, borderline slice-of-life style and the earlier reference to certain moments in life being "openings ... through which something higher became visible." With that in mind, I think my initial expectation of a big epic conclusion didn't make sense. This kind of ending suits the book better.
All in all, I really enjoyed AK. I didn't mind the length or the fact that it was more character-driven than plot-driven. It definitely felt like a serialized story formed out of a bunch of separate episodes where some episodes were better than others, but there was enough thematic and narrative consistency to connect it all together and even the "filler" was pretty enjoyable to read. I definitely would never have read it if it hadn't been for this book club, so thanks to everyone who participated.

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

Soooo

I'll finally settle down my business about moving to the US in about a week and a half. Probably gonna do the live discussion for this novel in about two weeks. I hope to get a bunch of you to participate. What time works best for you guys?

 

[№56]

Soooo

I'll finally settle down my business about moving to the US in about a week and a half. Probably gonna do the live discussion for this novel in about two weeks. I hope to get a bunch of you to participate. What time works best for you guys?

Weekends are best for me, I'm free pretty much whenever.

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

For the discussion my plan was to go through the major HAPPENINGS of the novel and discuss them in order, and then see where the convo goes lol.