This was a long read, I think I started in late September and have only just finished now at the very end of December. Well worth it though.

When beginning the book the main thing that struck me was how literally the text was written. The author directly describes what the characters do, what they think and how things make them feel, if a character is sad then you will be told as such rather than having it hinted at through allusions and dramatic effects. In some ways it reads like a play, in that you could take a lot of the text as instructions on how to portray the characters.

However, as I said, this was my impression at the start, now that I am at the end I feel somewhat differently. I think the most powerful thing about this book is how true to life the characters are, and whats more, how unexpected and surprising they are. And that is not surprising in that they are unrealistic, its quite the opposite, they surprised me in that way that I feel only another human can surprise.

At the very end Levin has a long searched for revelation that the way to live his life is to stay true to his soul and embrace the good coming from within him rather than searching for external, rational, philosophies of life, from which he has got nothing but despair. As he realises this transformation within himself he expects that this will change his whole way of relating to the world and stop him arguing and generally being unpleasant to people since he has now found the meaning of his life. But of course that doesn’t happen, and he eventually resolves that at the very end. I loved the journey of this, that as in life, we change incrementally, and the happy contented person, from the outside can look very similar to one in complete inner turmoil.

Anna Karenina herself, she is basically in a downward spiral within herself, but she pushes things down and down towards the end and is comes as a surprise to all who know her when she commits suicide (but of course not to the reader). Her perfect outward beauty and composure fool everyone to some extend, some more than others, but this book really captures how a difference between those two things can really look, outward beauty and inner misery.

Overall, like all good stories, this faithfully captures something very real and very human, that is just as true and present in all our lives as it was at the time this book was written. I have very much enjoyed reading it.

I also have to add, I got a lot of satisfaction from having this massive tomb on my bedside table, the edition was very well printed and satisfying to leaf through. Something about the picture on the front also really caught my imagination, the woman depicted is not meant to be Anna Karenina, it is a portrait of an English woman, an artist, that was painted in real life the same year that Anna has her portrait painted in the book. When Tolstoy describes the portrait and how it captures her beauty but also something much greater, it really fits the picture on the front, to an uncanny degree.