le mot juste

Taken on a road somewhere out of Montana in September 2008. If you've ever been to the state, you'd know that's the only road to look for. Everything literally shut down at the wee hour of 8pm.

Anna Karenina was one of those novels I always wanted to read, if only for the sake of reading them. In a 2007 poll of contemporary authors, Anna Karenina was cited as the best novel ever written, beating out Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert. Now being half way into the book, I wonder if those people polled ever even read the book because I just can't seem to sit down and plow through it. In fact, it's not very plowable at all. The chapters are very short and each new chapter picks up on a different situation in the book. Having never read Tolstoy, I can't compare this to any other work of his. I'd known Anna Karenina to be a conflicted heroine and every time I'd heard of her, I imagined a sad train ride away from life, but these choppy chapters make it difficult for me to even follow her story line let alone sympathize with her. I keep hoping the letdown is due in part to my inability to focus right now and maybe the second half of the very long book will prove me wrong, but right now the future does not look promising.

In my frustration though, I did switch to Richard Yates who is very pleasing to me at the moment. I'm reading Revolutionary Road and am amazed at how poignant his observations are. The characters are so real and alive that they encompass me wholely and sometimes I forget I am reading fiction. What's interesting is that this novel along with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, both of which separate it by centuries, is about the banalities of life. In each work, people are not ravished by hunger or wars or illnesses. In fact, they have almost nothing to complain about at all, but still they are unhappy and the relationships around them simply deteriorate. Sound familiar? I used to laugh at the melancholy disease, or disease of the spleen if you will, that persisted during the 18th century amongst aristocrats who were prone to fits of sadness and fainting. I thought, These pathetic yuppies have to create something to be sad about, but maybe we now are these yuppies and melancholy has persisted past the aristocracy. In truth, amidst all the things we should be thankful for, why do we always focus on the negative?