A Classic Revisited

What Happened to Anna K. - I loved Tolstoy's “Anna Karenina” so I was tempted by the title, and since I was already on a Russian kick I decided to try it. But why would anyone attempt to update a masterpiece? In Irina Reyn's re-imagining of the classic story, the characters are Russian Jewish immigrants living in Queens and Manhattan. Anna is married to a well-to-do older businessman named Alex, a marriage which has allowed her to escape the immigrant community of Rego Park, Queens, for an expensive apartment on the Upper East Side. But she is a romantic, and at a New Year's party given by her cousin Katia's family, she meets Katia's boyfriend David and is smitten. Meanwhile Lev, a former schoolmate of Katia's, has long harbored a secret passion for her.

Got it? It's Vronsky and Anna, Kitty and Levin. And it's not as if you don't know how it's all going to turn out (Spoiler alert: the number 6 train). So what kept me reading? Partly because I admired Reyn's cleverness. In the original version Anna inadvertently reveals her feelings for Vronsky to her husband when they are watching a horse race and she reacts emotionally to Vronsky's fall. In Reyn's version, David is running the New York Marathon when the fall occurs. Nice touch.

Reyn, herself an immigrant, creates a vivid picture of the Russian Bukharian-Jewish community in Queens. The restaurants and discount clothing stores, the rituals at weddings and parties, even the descriptions of Anna's wardrobe, all seemed grounded in reality. Her writing is full of humor, and she does good job of getting inside Anna's head, of convincing us that a twenty-first century American might struggle with the same passions and fears as a nineteenth century Russian. I would certainly never recommend that you read this book instead of the original, but it provides an entertaining re-invention and is a great reminder of the universality of Tolstoy's classic.

Russian Coincidence

I am currently reading “The Madonnas of Leningrad” (see Dorothea's blog) for our Book Club in August, a story that takes place during the siege of Leningrad. But I always like to have at least two books going at once, so if I get bogged down or bored by one I can switch to the other. So I picked a second book by a roundabout method. I loved the movie “The 25^th Hour”, a gritty story set in New York directed by Spike Lee with a great performance by Edward Norton. The movie was based on David Benioff's book, and Benioff also wrote the screenplay. So I chose his latest book City of Thieves, thinking it would be another gritty, urban story. And in a way it is. But the city is not New York, and the time is not the present. The city of thieves in the title is ...Leningrad and the time is 1941. What are the odds?

City of Thieves is sort of the novelistic equivalent of a 'buddy movie'. But in a good way. The unlikely buddies are Lev, a scrawny Jewish seventeen-year-old who has remained in the embattled city in the hopes of defending his country and proving his manhood, and Kolya, a handsome, boastful, charismatic Red Army soldier who looks like an Aryan poster boy. They meet in a jail cell where both fear they are about to be executed. But instead their lives are spared and they are given a perilous assignment by the secret police. Their task will take them from the dangerous streets of Leningrad to even greater danger behind enemy lines. There are gun battles, close calls, brutality, struggles against the relentless cold of the Russian winter, a high stakes chess game. Does this sound grim? Actually, it's not. In fact there are parts, especially in the dialog between Lev and Kolya, that are downright funny.

Benioff is a terrific story-teller. You barely have time to catch your breath after one close call before you're hurtled into the next one. But he also captures well the conflicting emotions of Lev, who narrates the tale, as he comes to grips with his fears, his curiosity and his grudging bond with Kolya. This book is a little dark to recommend as a 'beach read', although the descriptions of long,cold marches through the snowy Russian forests might cool you off on hot day. But I can definitely recommend it as a fast-moving, page-turning thriller with sharp insights on the complex bonds of friendship.

The most fascinating Catherine

Catherine the Great by Henri Troyat takes an already fascinating history and enlivens it with focus on all manner of intrigue, scheming, sex and more sex. This naturally kept me glued to the pages. The tale of how an obscure 14 year old German princess came to be betrothed to the Grand Duke Peter, heir of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, and plotted her way into power is mesmerizing. The loathsome, infantile half-wit Peter is so bizarre as to seem a fictional creation. The young princess doesn't let that deter her; instead she carefully endears herself to the Russian people and engineers a coup the moment Peter ascends the throne.

As the years go by, the book does highlight Catherine's personal life rather than giving a thorough account of historical context, but the reader gets a sense of what Russia was like at that time for both royalty and for serfs, who were merely property. Catherine did succeed in bringing her adopted country more into the European mainstream, and may have been the first royal who espoused (although did not practice) egalitarianism.

This spiced-up biography is an entertaining and informative read.