![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() No first-person or free-indirect speech here. ![]() The teller, the narrator of the book, is a formless, omniscient voice with no elaborate Rothian construct to justify his role. Tolstoy doesn't believe in "show, don't tell". At one point he tells us what a character's dog is thinking. Instead of the solipsistic modern mode of events being experienced from the point of view of a single character, Tolstoy slips in and out of the consciousness of dozens of characters, major and minor. Instead of a barrage of metaphors describing things in terms of other things that they resemble, Lev Tolstoy seeks the precise word for the thing itself. Anna Karenina couldn't be less like a conventional modern novel. W hat is it about Anna Karenina that gives it special status among the great novels? How is it that a sensational romantic tragedy of tsarist high society, interspersed with digressions into 19th-century Russian agricultural policy, written in a seemingly plain, straightforward style across 900 pages, still provokes both excitement and respect from readers as diverse as JM Coetzee, Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey, and lures Tom Stoppard to write the script for the latest of a dozen film adaptations? The book floats in some charmed section of the lake of literary opinion where the ripples from modernism and the ripples from Hollywood overlap without merging. ![]()
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