Chitra Ramaswamy: Tolstoy story

ABOUT six years ago, I packed a bag to go on holiday. I can’t remember where I was going but I can remember what was in it. Anna Karenina.

Unlike William Faulkner, who when asked to name the three greatest novels of all time, replied, “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina,” I never ended up reading the book. I simply gave myself the pleasure of carrying Tolstoy’s 800-page masterpiece around with me, like a dog with a stick.

The following year Tiny but Deadly and I headed to Spain to stay in an old converted observatory, the most southern building in Europe. Across the straits, a hazy line of sloping hills strung with little white houses. Africa. In my suitcase, Anna Karenina. Both of them equally inaccessible. Every day I picked her up, felt her heft – physical, moral, psychological – and put her down again. Not yet, I thought. Maybe tomorrow.

After a few years of tomorrows, C and I wound up in Kefalonia. This time I was determined. Enough of this anthropomorphising of Anna K, as I was now calling her. In an attempt to put a stop to my dangerous new habit of populating my house with worn copies from secondhand book shops, I’d bought a new copy on my Kindle. “Maybe,” I reasoned, “I’ll nail this thing in digital format.”

One day I actually managed the first sentence, which is so famous I know it by heart anyway. Except in this pageless version, Tolstoy’s words had got lost in translation. “All happy families are alike,” it announced. “All unhappy families are not alike.”  I decided to read Middlemarch instead, which was my Anna Karenina of the 1990s.

All book-lovers have an Anna Karenina. That is, a book so precious you can never find a moment worthy enough to read the thing. Instead, you fill your hollow life with distractions, surround yourself with multiple copies (six and counting), fondle them, love them, but never read them. All the while the novel grows in stature and terror,  a monster staring out at you from a bookshelf.

So it is with the story Leo Tolstoy began publishing in instalments in 1873, roughly the time I first tried to read it. The problem, as he well knew, is that nothing is good enough for Anna. Where to read the greatest novel ever written? In the greatest place. And when? At the greatest time of one’s life. You can see why I’m still waiting.

In the meantime, I’ve sprouted a few grey hairs and moved from one Scottish city to another. Joe Wright has made a new film adaptation of Anna Karenina. Tiny but Deadly has read half of it. C has been to St Petersburg. I have learnt Russian (OK, I haven’t, but I could have done).

Life is short and books are long. C and I are going on holiday next week and Anna Karenina (the Penguin classic edition, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, since you’re asking) is coming with me. I am going to read her this time.

To celebrate something that has yet to happen, Ma  and Pa Ramaswamy and I watched the 1948 film version, starring Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson. It was a vintage night at the pictures, by which I mean we all sat  in our designated seats on the three-piece suite, and Ma and Pa R talked over all the love scenes.

Halfway through, Pa R decided to go to bed. This inability to commit to Anna Karenina must run in the family. It’s not my fault. I told him I was determined to read it. “Ah, yes,” he nodded. “I read it once. India. Must have been 50 years ago.” Then he looked confused. “Actually,” he said, looking dismayed. “I think I only got halfway through.”