Finished & Loved Anna Karenina!

Loved it! But I may have had my very first experience with an anxiety attack a few pages before her own anxiety resolved itself. Unpleasant. Sympathy anxiety with Anna? (Hers was wrapped up in societal rejection, failure as a mother, and mistrust of her worth-giving-up-everything-for love interest; mine was mostly nervousness about the house not yet being "baby ready". I think she wins [or does she...], and I'm ok with that.)

Did I mention that I loved reading this? As much as I loved reading this, my first piece of Russian lit, I most certainly will not delve into a detailed critique of the novel here (way too much to discuss!); I do want to take a short moment to defend my good friend, Jane Austen. Recently, I had a conversation with two (female) neighbors, who were both of the opinion that Austen's, well, basically for sissies and can't stand up with real, strong literature. These two women I was talking to are also self-proclaimed feminists; I'll stand by the importance of context in literature in saying that they're not looking at Austen in her context. So here's where I jump in and name Austen the author of feminists. Bear with me...

Yeah, yeah, Jane Austen writes about love and hesaid-shesaid and the girl catching the right guy and the guy winning the girl, but - and here's the big 'but' - her protagonists are all self-confident women going about their societal life and all of its rules with a little defiance, doing it their own way. Take a look, now, back at Tolstoy's dear Anna, and maybe throw in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and what do you have? Attractive women who start down a path of getting what they think will make them happy, albeit a little unconventionally, that ultimately leads them to ruin!

So you decide who the feminist in this group of contemporaries is - someone who writes a strong woman-in-her-time or someone (coincidentally of the opposite gender...) who writes a strong-willed woman who wills her own destruction.

Just sayin'.

So then Dylan and I watched the star-studded, modern adaptation the other day, and now he wants to read it, too; duh. He's got more knowledge of cultural Russia as a starting point than I did, and I talked to him about several things while I was reading, anyway. Needless to say, we stayed up way too late talking through all the good stuff that was both included in and left out of the movie and had lots of fun with it. Novel gets two eager thumbs-up; movie gets thumbs-up, too, but clearly lacks in comparison.