Well, it sort of is still baby land in a roundabout way. On the occasions when Toby’s been up at night – which seems to happen about twice a week at the moment – I’ve been reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I’ve found it beautifully written and easy to read, which makes it a fantastic novel to submerse myself in at the moment, where reading is even more piecemeal than normal. It’s set in Russian high society, spanning both the city and the country, and while its namesake Anna and her liaison with the soldier Vronsky form the principal storyline there’s another narrative told alongside it of the country landowner Levin who loves the beautiful but naive Kitty, daughter of a Prince and Princess. I don’t know how their part is going to end, but I really, really hope they get married and live happily ever after. They deserve it: Levin is such a solid, trustworthy, entirely perfect man! At the moment he’s mowing grass with his hired men. Tolstoy’s descriptions of the country and of Levin’s country lifestyle are my favourite parts of the book so far.
I often think that half the joy in reading books like this is the insight into another culture. An author from within that culture writes about what is normal and interesting and noteworthy, writing primarily for other people within the culture, and I think it gives great insight into how other people think and the similarities and differences that exist across different countries and borders. It’s like traveling to really foreign places: it broadens your mind. I often think the same thing when reading Italo Calvino or Milan Kundera. The story itself is only half the pleasure, the rest is in being introduced to a knew and exciting world view.
Another thing I find myself thinking, though, is how the original readers responded to the story. Calvino, for instance: I recently re-read Difficult Loves, a series of short stories, each one really a character study of some typical Italian person. To me, reading about a woman drinking coffee, or a man riding his bike to a factory to work, or someone losing their bathers while swimming at the ocean – these are all incredibly interesting because they build in my mind an image of Italy. But if you’re Italian, and every day you see women drinking coffee and men riding bikes, or in fact if you are an Italian woman or man who does these things, then the story itself would be all that is left of Calvino. Or Kundera, or Tolstoy. And would the story by itself be enough to keep the interest of a ‘native’? I guess in the case of these three it must be, as they have each attained a level of respect and longevity within their own cultures and languages as well as in mine.
Anyway, more thoughts about this later. I still don’t know how Anna Karenina ends. Or even, in fact, how it pans out – despite being 200 pages in I’ve still got three quarters to go. Now that’s longevity.
