What to say that hasn’t been said about this magnificent novel? Even calling it magnificent is old news. I read War and Peace a couple of years ago and loved it; but I have to say that the love I felt, feel, for War and Peace now seems trivial and limp in comparison to the overwhelming passion that Anna Karenina has inspired. There is a similarity there to be drawn between Anna and her husband, Alexei and Anna and Vronsky. Except Alexei was a tool and weak and totally undeserving of Anna’s love and devotion.

The characters in Anna versus War and Peace can be compared thus: in Anna, they were real, relatable and likable but in War and Peace, while being real they were also tiresome, loathsome and full of self-importance that one often equates with the leisurely upper echelons of society. Anna, herself, was so lovely; her beauty, kindness and intelligence leapt off the page. I felt her pain, her sorrow at the bottom of my own soul. So often, I cried for her and for all women who have been and are in horrid situations without hope of relief. To have to pick between love, passion and happiness and one’s child seems like the most cruel of choices. 

And it wasn’t just Anna who was fully fleshed out and lovable. The whole range of main female characters were ladies who I’d want to be friends with; Kitty, Dolly and their mother; and Levin was just as lovely as the women. The rest all fell under the usual Tolstoy umbrella of take ‘em or leave ‘em where their complexities and inward struggles were brought on by their own stupidities and not by society’s constraints. I have to say, though, it did not seem as though Tolstoy like Anna (the character) very much.

After her tragic death (I hope this is not a spoiler because that would mean that whomever it was spoiled for has been living under a rock in the world of literature), there seems to be no regret or mourning except for on the part of Vronsky, who in my opinion should have followed suit. I suppose that for a man who wrote of the struggles of the mid-nineteenth century Russian feminist unsympathetically, Anna was a “vile, irreligious woman”. Knowing Tolstoy’s history (vicious, cruel and unforgiving husband and later a total religious crank) this is not surprising.  

But I loved Anna, as perhaps only another woman could. To be half the person that she was would make me the life of any party, the most desirable person in any room.

I totally have a crush on Anna Karenina.  

I had to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark for my book club; I’m not sure I would have read it otherwise, but I’m glad that I did (mind you, it is on the Modern Library top 100 novels list and I am intent on reading 99 — I will never read Finnegan’s Wake. Never.). Very short, very sharp and very silly, I quite enjoyed it. I am not usually a fan of comic novels, especially that British ‘cleverness’ that writers like Evelyn Waugh employ (ooh, look how cleverly I dissect the obvious shortcomings of society!) but I found that Spark used just enough of drama and intrigue to offset the satirical tone. And, oh, how I wish that I’d had a teacher like Miss Brodie — a teacher who had taught less curriculum and more life knowledge; if I were ever to be a teacher that is the kind of teacher I’d want to be (although, probably a little more left of the whole fascism thing that Miss Brodie was so fond and I would want to be slightly less manipulative and selfish and childish). Now, to watch the movie (MAGGIE SMITH!!!).

It may be sacrilege to call myself a) a feminist and b) an avid reader and to have just read my first ever Virginia Woolf but there it is. I finished To the Lighthouse this morning and to be honest, I found it rather weary, beautifully realized and wonderful use of language but weary. I generally don’t have a lot of patience for sincere verbosity; the kind of flowery language that takes itself entirely too seriously; give me Nabokov and his tongue-in-cheek pompousness any day, but I digress (I’m sure that in the life of this blog there will be plenty of opportunities to rave about my love, Vladimir).

I did really like the subtly of the characters; especially that they were not static but would waver in their loyalties, in their preferences for each other depending on their moods. All the characters were so well-fleshed out despite for some Woolf barely dedicated two descriptive lines — an ability that I generally see only in short-stories.

The simplicity of the story was another thing that I enjoyed; that Woolf could weave out an entire family’s dynamic in less than two hundred pages and barely forty-eight hours of actual time while keeping the plot both a minor element and at the fore-front of the novel.

Hmm, I guess that the heaviness of the descriptive language is heavily outweighed by what I enjoyed of the novel so consider this a reversal of my initial rating. I quite enjoyed To the Lighthouse. So there.

I love Knut Hamsun. I began his canon with Mysteries (wonderful) then Hunger (hilarious and wonderful) and now I’ve just finished Growth of the Soil, the novel for which he won the Nobel Prize.

It is rare to find an epic, especially an epic set on taming the wilderness with one’s own hands that doesn’t pander in tragedy. I am so accustomed to reading sprawling epics, or any literature at all, that tests the human condition by sending it’s protagonist disease, famine, death, heartache, the clap, ghosts, war, poverty. But, man Growth of the Soil doesn’t have any of that (well, maybe a couple of dead babies but really can a book qualify as literature without dead babies?). Every time Isak set outto build something, a new house, a new barn, a sawmill, another new barn, I held my breath and nearly squeezed my eyes shut anticipating the maiming or heart attack or horse kick to the throat, but I was delivered frommy misery because Growth of the Soil wasn’t about hardship and toil, ok maybe it was but it was not about heartache; not every single farming family is mired in tragedy;my grandmother and her ten siblings all grew up on a farm with all ten fingers, all ten toes and all their brain cells — it is possible.

But, I digress… What is so amazing about Knut Hamsun is that he helped invent the psychological novel using stream of conscience and interior monologue. He believed that novels should be less about plot and more about the human condition as illustrated through their thoughts, not actions. He described his ideal novels as being “whisper of blood and the pleading of bone marrow”. Both Hunger and Mysteries take those tropes and smash you in the face with them leaving you stunned, bloody and begging for more but Growth of the Soil is much more subtle, the characters are much simpler than those in the former, much more single minded yet it’s in that single mindedness that Hamsun’s genius shines through; like every great novelist he manages to make his readers understand and more importantly, relate to his characters.

Unfortunately, much like so many of our artistic greats, Hamsun had a few, ahem, demons. He was a bit of a (mumbles quietly) Nazi sympathizer. He may or may not have (he did) sent his Nobel Prize to Goebbles and he wrote a terrifying eulogy for Hitler. Yikes. The only ray of light in that whole disgusting mess is that after the fall of Germany he was found to be in a deteriorated mental state (maybe it was a tumour?) and so could not be charged with treason. There are some parts of Growth of the Soil that drew attention to his prejudices; like any good Aryan, he really hated the Sami (Northern people of Norway, Finland and Sweden akin to Inuit) he uses the derogative term Lapps the entire novel and there are several points in Growth of the Soil that he takes the opportunity to slam them. 

Really, don’t let the whole “I love Hitler” thing dissuade you from reading his novels; we would all be hard pressed for entertainment if we were unable to separate the humans from the artists (please don’t think I am excusing racism, abuse or any other awful acts) and if you love literature, then you owe it to yourself to read Knut Hamsun.