Anna Karenina

A quick surf of the Internet confirms that adaptations of Anna Karenina are as thick on the ground as photos of Kate Middleton's breasts. So why another one? Jo Wright's new film of one of the classics of all classics is yet another unfortunate example of the failure of film to capture the essence of a great novel. Though it's not a tedious or boring film, I'll give it that — the lush and theatrical scenes (it's staged as if it were a play) sweep you  along exuberantly from one extravagant, highly stylised set to the next. It was only twenty minutes or so before the end that I started shuffling and fidgeting. Would that goddamn train never arrive? There'd certainly been plenty of anticipatory whistles and thrusting piston rods over the preceding half-hour.

Now, I've nothing against Kiera Knightley as an actress, though so far in her career I think she's been good rather than great. Here she plays a much shallower, more one-dimensional Anna than the one I remember from the Tolstoy novel, an Anna who is bored with her marriage and ripe for an infatuation. The infatuation happens. She gets brilliant sex for the first time in her life. And then becomes all neurotic — a part Knightley plays well, since it's a part she played in another of her recent films, A Dangerous Method (see my review of it here). I'm afraid I tired of her distorted mouth displaying strings of saliva between her teeth. But, hey, that's film for you! At least you can imagine this when reading the book. If you wish.

Wright adopts the interesting but bizarre technique of filming the novel very stagily, using numerous 'distancing' techniques which seem intent on alienating the audience from the characters. For what reason? Obviously he wanted to come up with a radically different framework — it must have been daunting to compete with all those other interpretations of one of Russia's literary masterpieces. However, this ill-conceived Brechtian approach leaves us up the emotional creek without a paddle. Do we identify with Anna or not? Have we any sympathy at all with Karenin, her husband? And Vronsky is definitely not the sexily handsome, compelling, more well-rounded character I recall from the book — or is my memory playing tricks? In the film he's portrayed as an effete and sometimes cruel dandy.

War And Peace

The one thing necessary, in life and in art, is to tell the truth. TOLSTOY

With the temperature hovering around the freezing mark here in the UK, it may seem masochistic of me to be reading about Russian winters - but that's what I'm doing. I'm five hundred pages into War and Peace. I've been wanting to read it for a long time but somehow have never got round to it. Tolstoy wrote his master work between the years of 1862 and 1867 and, of course, it's considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, novel ever written. I would not disagree. It's an extraordinary book.

In War and Peace Tolstoy paints a huge canvas depicting Russia in the early years of the nineteenth century, the time of the Napoleonic Wars. There are three main foci in the book: the households of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, and the figure of Pierre Bezuhov. (You can clearly see Tolstoy himself in this character. Like Pierre, Tolstoy had led a dissolute life of drinking, gambling and womanizing until, at the age of thirty four, he married and transformed his life into one of helping others, and striving towards the infinite, the eternal and the absolute.)

Tolstoy's psychological penetration into all his characters is remarkable; he explores moralistically their foibles, delusions and idiosyncrasies - as well as their bravery, compassion and common humanity - with skill and insight. Yet he never rushes to condemn, and remains the objective, dispassionate novelist, portraying life in all its chaos, misery and glory.War is a major theme in the novel, and he writes realistically about war and its horror, describing it as the vilest thing in life. In the introduction to my Penguin Classics' edition the translator, Rosemary Edmonds, states: War and Peace is a hymn to life. It is the Iliad and the Odyssey of Russia. 

I wonder if you have a book, or several books, you've always been intending to read, but have never taken down from the shelf? Classics, perhaps, which you feel you really should read one day, but in your bones you know you probably never will? Sometimes the prospect of a long, what we may perceive as a 'heavy' classic, may seem a little daunting, so we turn to something shorter and more contemporary. What I would say is this: dive in! In my experience the perceived 'difficult' books, those formidably towering landmarks of literature, are often the most rewarding, readable and engrossing of all books. (I found this with Cervantes' Don Quixote. Edith Grossman's 2003 translation reads like a dream. Even my daughter read the book in one go, and she doesn't normally read major classics.)

I'll end with this sobering, yet strangely liberating quotation from War and Peace. Pierre Bezuhov, at a turning point in his life, says, All we can know is that we know nothing. And that is the sum total of human wisdom. (I often feel myself that the more I know, the less I know, and the more there is to know. In our lifetimes we can only ever absorb, in the vaguest and most inadequate way, one millionth of the total sum of knowledge.)    

This Reading Life (2)

The sage-like figure of Goethe looms over German literature like Shakespeare does over ours. This from his Italian Journey...

...knowing that life, taken as a whole, is like the Roman Carnival: unpredictable, unsatisfactory and problematic. I hope that this carefree crowd of maskers will make them [my readers] remember how valuable is every moment of joy, however fleeting and trivial it may seem to be.

Similarly, Tolstoy is the writer who towers over Russian literature. I've read Anna Karenina, but I'm ashamed to say I have yet to read War And Peace. I see I haven't noted down the origin of this Tolstoyan quotation...

Admit that human life can be guided by reason and all possibility of life is annihilated.

And while we're on Russian literature, Anton Chekhov, who penned some of the most sublime plays and short stories ever written, observed...

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy.

The opening sentences of the Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography reverberate in the mind long after the book has been put down...

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I must have been subconsciously following Mark Twain's advice when I walked the Camino towards the end of last year...

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

And finally two quotes about the power of language, and its potential force for good. The first from John Berger...

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannnot be hostile to man.

Developing this theme, the distinguished academic and Bob Dylan critic Christopher Ricks writes in his fascinating, deep and detailed book Dylan's Visions Of Sin...

Words trust, and they can keep faith. They are built upon faith, the faith that people will tell the truth - or at any rate that people may betray themselves when they are failing to do so... A language is a body of agreement, and acts of trust. A word is not a matter of fact, or matter of opinion, it is a social contract. Like all contracts, its life is a pledge and a faith. (And, like all contracts, it can be dishonest, suspect.) Songs and poems likewise keep faith alive. They "strengthen the things that remain" - words of the Book of Revelation...

As Dylan aficionados will know, Dylan quotes these Biblical words in his song When You Gonna Wake Up from the album Slow Train Coming. Unlike many, I never did turn against Dylan during his evangelical, religious phase - and some very good songs did come out of this period, for instance Precious Angel...

I've really enjoyed leafing through my old notebooks of quotations. I hope some of the sentiments struck a chord with some of you. Perhaps I'll do the same again some time...