Back in real time, today, Wednesday the eleventh of July 2012, I finally finished “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. It’s been a long journey, both physically, mentally and timewise. I started reading it one morning in Frida’s dorm room in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in the beginning of March. Now I’m in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, California and it’s July. Four months. That might be the longest time it has taken me to finish a book. And certainly the longest distance traveled on land. I have no idea about the kilometers, but for all of you who know Köppen, I’ve traveled all the way from a cold temperate climate zone to a hot and dry Mediterranean climate zone with Anna and Vronsky and Levin and Kitty in my mind. And if you don’t happen to speak Köppen, I can just tell you, you would be impressed.
It really is a good book too. A great book. Tolstoy has such extraordinary finesse and precision in his writing, that you feel like you know the characters already after the first introductory sentence. And the way he makes you feel for them, even though you might not like them. The couple of chapters that describe the birth of a firstborn child from the father’s perspective might be the best piece of prose I have ever read. He is a master, and the novel is a masterpiece. There’s just nothing else to say about it.
But lying there in the dry grass by the pond, after my post-weeding swim, with the afternoon breeze starting to build up in the wild plum trees on the hill, I felt such relief. Reading the last sentence and putting the book down, it felt like I could suddenly breathe freely again. It had been Such a Long Book.
Later, after lunch, when I was preparing to go back down to the pond and realised that I now, for the first time in four months, got to do one of the most exciting things I know, namely, start reading a new book, the feeling of relief was enriched by a bubbly happiness and anticipation. I felt like I had the entire world at my fingertips. It was one of those rare moments of pure happiness.
Of course, I couldn’t control myself. I ended up taking two books with me to the pond: the Neil Gaiman short story collection that I got from Natalia, and the little book about buddhist meditation that I got from aunt Kaarina just before leaving Stockholm. They started beautifully, both of them. I feel like a completely different person.
Katja Malmborg 