What I'm Reading Now

 K.J. Parker, Savages

This is a K.J. Parker that I somehow managed to overlook -- I've read all of Parker except the fencing trilogy (I read the first one in that) and his trilogy about the guy who wakes up with amnesia, which got way too dark for me. This one is a little dark, but very engaging. It follows some guys through ten or fifteen years of their lives, during which two "savage" nations tangle with a giant empire which has just bankrupted itself, in terms of both men and money, in fighting another giant empire. A lot here about logistics and the problems of fighting wars with mercenaries and the horrific behavior of soldiers and nations. Parker is terrible with women; this one has more women than usual, but they're just as bad as his women always are. It's like he's never met a woman? I don't know.

Parker does not write the sort of books I normally enjoy, but these seize hold of you and suck you in. He's the sort of writer it's hard to stop reading.

I also really like his Aram peoples ( one of the "savage" groups) and their culture.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This is a re-read, technically. I read it in graduate school, one summer when I was reading all of Tolstoy. But that was over 20 years ago, and I remembered almost nothing about it. I did remember Kitty and Levin getting engaged by writing in "code" to each other with chalk on the green card table, but that's about it.

Anyway, this is an amazing book. Like Middlemarch, it captures an entire society and the world that created that society. It's hard to even pick out bits to talk about, because the whole thing is such a wonderfully constructed piece. 

The main subject, as the famous first line hints, is family. Why are some families happy and others not? What makes a family "happy"? 

We have three main families in the novel, though several other families do show up. First, Anna and her families -- first with her husband Karenin, and second with her lover Vronsky. With Karenin, she has a son; with Vronsky, a daughter. 

The second family is Dolly and Stiva, and their billions of children. (I think it's actually six? But Dolly also has children who die, so.) Stiva also has a number of affairs, which Dolly decides she must just endure, since she's not able to support her kids on her own. 

Finally, there is Kitty and Levin. They don't marry until halfway through the book, but much of the book concerns their prospective marriage -- for instance, Kitty's failure to accept Levin's initial proposal begins warping her life at once, and Tolstoy spends a great deal of time showing us what her life might be like if she fails to marry Levin. (Not terrible! But also very different.) Then, once they are married, we see what the first years of a successful marriage are like. This part of the book is very realistic.

Are these families happy or unhappy? That's kind of the joke, I think, if joke is the right word. Happy and unhappy, like everyone. But on the balance, Anna's families are more unhappy than happy, and the blame for this seems to lie, not with Anna, but with her cold and bitter first husband, Alexie Karenin. He is doing what his society tells him is "honorable" when he refuses to divorce Anna; and in his refusal to give her access to her son; but this results in misery not just for Anna but for him and his son as well.

Similarly, Dolly's family is mostly happy, and again, this is because of Dolly, who decides she must forgive her straying husband. And Kitty and Levin are mostly happy because they both work hard at not lying to each other, and not hurting one another on purpose (though they do hurt each other, that's just how relationships work).

One of my favorite parts of the novel is when Kitty accepts Levin's second proposal, and he's crazed with joy. He doesn't sleep and can't eat. At one point, we're told, he puts a piece of bun in his mouth, but his "mouth didn't know what to do with it," so he spat it out again.

I also like that Tolstoy gives us the point of view of Levin's dog, Laska, more than once. Her exasperation and tolerance of her stupid human is wonderful.

I didn't really like, but I found interesting, the discussions of whether women should be educated. Tolstoy clearly thinks not -- education will lead women away from their proper work, which is caring for their families -- but it's also clear, in the book, that education would have been the salvation of many of the women we meet.

Oh, and there's also a delightful bit where Anna explains to Dolly just how it is that Anna can make sure she has no more children. It's entirely off the page, but it's clear that Anna is talking about birth control. (I don't know what kind of birth control, because we get a series of asterisks instead of the actual dialogue.) Dolly is astonished, having clearly had no idea that such a thing was possible. So that's why some families only have one or two children! she thinks. 

Anyway, a wonderful book. It's like a thousand pages long, but very much worth the time.