Literary Pick (*)

Anna Karenina- Leo Tolstoy

This book took me too long to finish. Normally, I go through books faster than I go through towels, but Anna Karenina is true to Tolstoy's form, he writes beautifully, but what's missing is deep-rooted psychological honesty and emotion. Sometimes I think Tolstoy was too hung up on his own agenda of Puritanism to allow himself to be true to the realistic direction of human nature. For Tolstoy women belonged here, and men belonged there, and you read it in all of his books. He was also hung up on peasant-workers (muzhiks) and their rights, a topic that resurfaces in all of his works. Although his short stories, The Kruetzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Illych are two of my all-time favorite stories, I'm glad I don't have to read any other of his larger works again.

I would like to say that the most disappointing part of the novel wasn't Anna's anti-climatic suicide, but Levin's totally superfluous character.