Deb­bie Ja­cob

If you have ever felt that hap­pi­ness is dif­fi­cult or im­pos­si­ble to achieve, then you def­i­nite­ly need to read An­na Karen­i­na (our cur­rent SAS Book club se­lec­tion) by Leo Tol­stoy. An­na Karen­i­na dis­sects hap­pi­ness in a most provoca­tive way.

That An­na Karen­i­na is a grip­ping nov­el we can't de­ny, yet just how does Tol­stoy man­age to suck us in­to An­na's dilem­ma of whether to re­main in an un­hap­py but re­spectable mar­riage or trade her safe life for a whirl­wind re­la­tion­ship with her lover? What is it that makes An­na's sto­ry such a com­pelling read? Why is An­na so un­hap­py with her choic­es? Is un­hap­pi­ness An­na's fate? How much con­trol does An­na re­al­ly have over her life? Gary Saul Mor­son an­swers many of these ques­tions in his book An­na Karen­i­na in Our Time, pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Mor­son says, "[...] Tol­stoy shows us the over­looked com­plex­i­ties of con­scious­ness. Be­tween two thoughts that ap­par­ent­ly fol­low im­me­di­ate­ly one up­on the oth­er, Tol­stoy sees sev­er­al steps. He no­tices a se­ries of al­most in­stan­ta­neous mis­tak­en in­ter­pre­ta­tions that we re­ject too fast to re­mem­ber."

Re­mark­able events, Tol­stoy be­lieves, are not the re­sult of one ma­jor ac­tion. They are most of­ten a suc­ces­sion of lit­tle events and some­times noth­ing more than mere co­in­ci­dences. As Mor­son ex­plains, "In Tol­stoy, both pos­si­bil­i­ties-sig­nif­i­cance and to­tal in­signif­i­cance-are al­ways pos­si­ble... He does not al­low us to as­sume that if an event is de­scribed it must mean some­thing." Mor­son cat­e­gories An­na Karen­i­na as a "pro­sa­ic" nov­el, a type of re­al­ist nov­el, that con­tains many or­di­nary events. "For these nov­els, grand dra­ma and ec­sta­t­ic mo­ments do not make a life good. Life is an every­day af­fair, and the sum to­tal of un­re­mark­able, dai­ly hap­pen­ings de­fine its qual­i­ty. Life, good and evil, af­fect us most strong­ly in count­less small ways, each of which is bare­ly vis­i­ble. In the pro­sa­ic nov­el, he­roes and hero­ines who live for ex­treme mo­ments mis­un­der­stand what life is."

In An­na Karen­i­na, Mor­son says, Tol­stoy tries to "redi­rect our at­ten­tion to as­pects of every­day liv­ing: love and the fam­i­ly, moral de­ci­sions, the process of self-im­prove­ment and, ul­ti­mate­ly, all that makes a life feel mean­ing­ful or leads us to con­tem­plate sui­cide." In short, Mor­son says, what makes a life good or bad is how the or­di­nary mo­ments are lived. Tol­stoy is a mas­ter at toy­ing with his read­ers' emo­tions. Tra­di­tion­al lit­er­a­ture has taught us to dig for a pur­pose while Tol­stoy at­tempts to de­con­struct mean­ing and al­low his read­ers the ex­pe­ri­ence of mere­ly liv­ing the sto­ry with­out try­ing to read some mon­u­men­tal mean­ing in­to every event such as An­na chang­ing her mind every sec­ond. All of this makes An­na Karen­i­na an en­tire­ly dif­fer­ent ex­pe­ri­ence in lit­er­a­ture. What's more, Tol­stoy teach­es the in­valu­able les­son that no one is re­spon­si­ble for our own hap­pi­ness but us. Next week: What is the best clas­sic?

Note to read­er: Get your copy of Cloud At­las by David Mitchum, our next SAS Book Club book. Join us in the Face­book group SAS Book Club for more dis­cus­sion on An­na Karen­i­na.