Review:
I heard about Unwind from the Queens Library, in an email newsletter talking up good new young adult books. I’m so glad that I did, because it’s a dystopian thrill ride in the same vein as Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy, only with the same intellectual depth and emotional heart that you find in Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

Here’s the deal with unwinding. Anyone under the age of 18 can be unwound by their legal guardian. It’s like a retroactive abortion, only every last piece of the unwind is harvested for reuse by another person. Organs, limbs, brain cells, even eyelashes–they all get doled out to the needy. Connor’s parents send him for unwinding because they have too many kids, but he’s lucky–and smart–enough to get away. He ends up on the run with Risa, a ward of the state whose unwinding comes when the home runs out of beds, and Lev, a “tithe” whose parents are unwinding him as a sacrifice to God.

I was so impressed with the way that Neal Shusterman engaged with big issues in Unwind. He didn’t shy away from tackling the abortion and bioethics debates head on in all their complexity. He didn’t dumb anything down, and he didn’t moralize or proselytize. The result is a book that offers a lot of food for thought in what also happens to be a page-turning thriller.

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Review:
It’s absurd to blog about War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s sprawling behemoth of a novel. The title alone is ludicrous and unfathomable. People laugh when you say you’re reading it, not because they think it’s not worth reading, but because of its reputation as one of the longest books ever written. Nevertheless, I, the Superfast Reader, who read this book for the Summer Reading Challenge, and as a personal goal before my baby comes in November, will try my best.

Let me start by saying that I loved this book. My heart was captured from the very start, and the soaring romanticism of such passages like Princess Marya’s flight from Moscow or Natasha’s near ruination left me breathless. It’s such a life-affirming work, and not in a facile way, either. Tolstoy’s vision of the abundant life necessitates the acceptance of death–the embrace of death–and only those characters who face the darkness are allowed to enter into the fullness of joy. I can’t imagine I’m saying anything new about this work, but Tolstoy’s exploitation of this motif was a revelation to me on a profound spiritual level.

I must confess that I found the “war” sections tedious and ponderous, but that’s because I’m not very keen on history, particularly military history. I loved the way he brought the characters to life within the conflict and on the very battlefields themselves, but I couldn’t get myself interested in Tolstoy’s analysis of how Napoleon managed to get as far as the heart of Russia itself. I feel like the sixty-year-old me might really get into it, though, so I’m already looking forward to that rereading.

There is nothing, nothing like getting lost in another world, and Tolstoy transported me to Russia. I’ve been there just once, ten days in Anna Karenina’s Petersburg and Andrei Rublev’s Novgorod, but never to Moscow. I’m dying to see true Russia, “round Russia” as Pierre puts it when contemplating Platon’s charisma, and hope someday to ride the Transiberian railway from Moscow through Mongolia to China. It’s a dream that I’m craving even more, now that I’ve indulged in such an excess of Russianness.

I’m so glad I read this book, but I’m kind of embarrassed by what I’ve written already. I’m nowhere near conveying the experience of reading the book, or communicating how it’s worked on me over the last three weeks, or my sadness at having to say goodbye to Pierre and Natasha and Marya and Prince Andrey (oh!) and the rest. Some books are too big for anything but reading.

So read it, wouldja?

PS–This translation was outstanding, in the readability department.

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Review:
I’d be a fool if I tried to pretend I were anywhere up to the task of critiquing The Brothers Karamazov. I can honestly say I’m a little freaked out by what I’ve just been through. Karamazov is a rollicking glory of human depravity shot through with tastes of the divine. Dostoevsky doesn’t hesitate to put theology and intellectual arguments adjacent to lively carnality. I read the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, which really moves, showing off the Pantagruelian aspect of Dostoevsky’s endeavor.

I loved the characters, but became frustrated when they made choices that seemed arbitrary or just plain stupid. I felt sorry for Smerdyakov, the bastard son, born to Stinking Lizaveta–but then again, I felt some measure of pity for all of Fyodor Karamazov’s sons. He’s the original deadbeat dad, though his attempts at involvement in Alyosha’s life prove almost as destructive than his abandonment of oldest son Dmitri.

There were long passages that frustrated me, and I know I didn’t glean from this book even a quarter of the riches it contains. I don’t often say this, but I wish that I’d read it for a class in college, so as to get the context and a window into its meaning. Lectures and class discussion sure helped me love Moby-Dick, for example.

The book I was most reminded of while reading Karamazov was John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Both are superficially comedies that mask deeply serious ambitions. Neither offers a classic emotional experience (my preference), but couldn’t be called dry or bloodless by any stretch.

I think I basically need to reread this in about 10 years.

Maybe 20.

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The tale of a society woman and her unconventional love affair contrasts with that of a landowner struggling with faith and duty.

Review:

Anna Karenina. The very words have struck me with fear and awe ever since a disastrous Russian History class in 12th grade, where I discovered my superpower’s limits for the first time. I elected to read Anna for my final paper because I wanted to read Anna, but I had four AP exams happening at the same time and should’ve chosen something much shorter. The whole thing blew up in my face and I ended up getting in trouble for not reading the entire book, which at my school was an honor offense. Since other girls in my class had out-and-out cheated, I ended up just having to take a C on the paper (which was very well-written on the 200 pages I actually read). I think that might have been what kept me out of my top-choice college but I ended up loving the school I went to so, as you see, things worked out for the best even though AP exams are my Kryptonite.

Here I am *cough* years later, and I find that Anna Karenina is an astonishingly fast read. I couldn’t be more riveted by all of the characters Tolstoy presents to me: passionate, foolish Anna; tormented, brooding Levin; flighty, honest Kitty; and “he’s just not that into you” Vronsky. Tolstoy masterfully shifts between (rare) third person omniscient, first person stream-of-consciousness, and many scenes where point-of-view shifts between several characters as they interact with each other.

As Anna and Vronsky’s relationship implodes, Tolstoy ratchets up the tension by leaving us inside Anna’s head as she has the mother of all panic attacks. Anyone who’s ever been unable to let well enough alone in a relationship will connect with Anna’s torment as she tries to force Vronsky to be loving towards her without seeing that her need and dependence is driving him away. She’s a black hole that can’t be filled, and Vronsky responds with the cold hammer of indifference. It’s horrifying, because it’s so true to life, and Tolstoy doesn’t miss a single shade of the horror.

Levin’s story was a welcome reprieve from Anna’s darkness. Though he’s suffering metaphysical pangs related to his inability to have faith, he never seems in danger the way Anna does, even though he contemplates suicide from time to time. I think it’s because his struggles are honest. He’s not lying to himself the way Anna is. Anna wants her infidelity to be something other than it is. She wants to call evil good. Levin, on the other hand, wants to know the nature of goodness, because, despite his atheism, he sees good in the world and wants to be as close to it as he can. His frustration comes when he sees how his own innate selfishness and pettiness keep him from his goal.

Some the best passages in Anna Karenina concern the nature of marriage, which Tolstoy examines from all angles. There are the bad marriages, of course, like Anna’s, and like that of Anna’s brother Oblonsky who is a compulsive philanderer. But there is also a marriage that’s just a normal marriage between two people trying to get used to one another. They have ups and downs, times of tenderness and times of warfare, and Tolstoy shows it all.

There are scenes in Anna Karenina that I’ll never forget: Levin in the fields mowing with the peasants, Kitty at the ball, Karenin forgiving his wife as she gives birth to another man’s son, Levin’s brother on his deathbed, Kitty’s giving birth to her first child, and many others–but most of all, I will never forget Anna, proud Anna with her dark hair and sad eyes. I want to shake her by the shoulders and tell her to see the truth about Vronsky, that their love is counterfeit, that she doesn’t have to put up with it from him or put up with Karenin’s mocking piety or society’s stupid rules. I’m so angry because I love her so very, very much.

(A note on the translation: I found the Joel Carmichael translation to be accessible, and the introduction said it has a lot to do with the naming conventions, which are English, not Russian (where you get all the patronyms and nicknames and different people calling the same person different things at different times. It must have worked, because I had no problem keeping the vast amount of characters and their relationships straight. I definitely recommend this translation.)

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