My sister passed on to me this poem by Billy Collins, the poet laureate. It's *brillliant*, I tell you! At last, someone else who agrees with me that Anna Karenina is unmitigated drivel.
On Closing Anna Karenina, by Billy Collins
I must have started reading this monster
a decade before Tolstoy was born
but the vodka and the suicide are behind me now,
all the winter farms, ice-skating and horsemanship.It consumed so many evenings and afternoons,
I thought a Russian official would appear
to slip a medal over my lowered head
when I reached the last page.But I found there only the last word,
a useless looking thing, stalled there,
ending its sentence and the whole book at once.With no more plot to nudge along and nothing
to unfold, it is the only word with no future.It stares into space and chants its own name
as a traveler whose road has just vanished
might stare into the dark, vacant fields ahead,
knowing he cannot go forward, cannot go back.
Actually, he's the FORMER poet laureate. :-)
Ah, so I guess certain people didn't actually approve of him thinking such heretical thoughts. ;-)
[...] There are some books that I simply wouldn’t ever get through if I couldn’t listen to them. Some of this is due to time, and some of it is due to the difficulty of certain books. Anna Karenina just about killed me, but I got through the entire thing, reading it the old fashioned way on paper. But that was an act of sheer willpower. There are some books, however, that when read in a different voice, can hold my attention a little better, and I can get through them. I made it through a number of Anne Rice books this way, which I really don’t think I could have done otherwise. [...]
Where do you get from the poem that he thinks Anna Karenina is "unmitigated drivel"? I get a certain sadness about the last word, as if he didn't want it to end, but no dislike for the book itself.
He seems like a bright lad, so I interpreted his words to mean that he agreed with me. Vodka and near-suicide got me through the book, too.
I, on the other hand, had great joy at the last word, like a seemingly-insurmountable mountain had been climbed.