I don't think I fully appreciated how amazing the Harold Washington Library is until this afternoon. I knew it was an interesting place, with a lovely indoor garden on the top floor and some cool art. But today I went in for the books and went into a mild ecstasy walking through the fiction shelves. There are just so many books out there, many of them good and brilliant and wonderful, too many to read in one lifetime. I wandered along the shelves in visual and performing arts, mesmerized by art criticism titles and chronicles of rock bands. The strangest thing is that I feel the interiors of most libraries are sort of...unappealing. But all those books...dear lord, books make life worth living. I would live in a library or a bookstore just to be surrounded by mountains of them all the time.

I read a novel recently called Tolstoy Lied. The premise is that, as the title implies, Tolstoy lied in that first line of Anna Karenina. The protagonist, a twentieth-century American literature professor, thinks his claim makes happiness seem boring. If all happy families are alike, then how are they possibly interesting? What is it about tragedy that fascinates us, as readers and human beings? She has also consciously chosen to be single, since her philosophy is that happiness does not require a family.

That is definitely not how I interpreted that line. I read it as saying that happy people have happiness in common, but not the things that make them happy or their expressions of happiness. But maybe that's the key distinction. A happy person is not necessarily part of a happy family. I think there are more commonalities between happy families than happy people, just because a family is an institution. Once you're in a family, you're a wheel in the machine, making it hum along smoothly and generate domestic bliss. Let's say families are like cars. They could be shiny Mercedes-Benzes or beat up Hondas, but if they're happy, they'll take you where you're going. The unhappy ones sit in the junkyard. So if I had to accept a generalization, I would say that Tolstoy actually was pretty close to the mark. But if you take apart that car/family, then look at all those little pieces! A piston is not a steering wheel is not a windshield wiper. Happy families may all be alike, but every happy person is happy in their own way.

I definitely did not expect that to turn into an automobile analogy. Go figure.

My mom gave me Tolstoy Lied for Christmas last year, and it was part of the reason why I made myself read Anna Karenina. It seemed like the logical order. After I finished Anna Karenina, I talked about it with my mom, I told her about my confusion regarding Anna. I somehow went into the novel expecting that I should feel sorry for her, that I should like her, so I was a little surprised that she was probably my least favorite of them all. Mom thought that was part of the novel's appeal, that all of the people are so flawed. I should point out that the first time I heard that opening line was from her, many, many years ago; Mom said it's one of her favorite lines in literature. She especially remembered Anna's selfishness, but that didn't bother me so much while I was reading. What irked me most was her dependence, her need to make her decisions based on the actions of her men. Granted, that partly a product of the novel's time, and I am very glad women today don't have to live like that. But it was a character thing too. 

I would like to get married one day, but right now I'm too selfish to really consider it. Like Madame Karenina, I want it all. And I do wonder if, rather than have an affair and end up under a train, I will go about having it all by avoiding the matrimony thing altogether, either by choice or by accident. But that prospect doesn't scare me. I mean, the times I've been involved with guys, I usually turn into a mildly obsessive (and probably annoying) basket case. I'm good by myself.

Tolstoy Lied was a good book. Not perfect, not by a long shot. And although the ending wasn't bad per se, I sort of wanted it to resolve differently. But it was the right book at the right time. The subject matter exactly in tune with what had been on my mind recently, due to the weddings, flings, and agonizings about both that happened this summer. And it's a fantastically nerdy concept, a love story seen through a literary criticism lens. I wanted to read lit theory when I was done. Also within ten minutes of finishing, I knew two friends who I wanted to pass it along to (one of them has it now), which rarely happens when I finish a novel. It's the sort of reaction I live for, a book that's compelling, that I want to share and talk about and write about and analyze. It's the sort of novel I want to write. But that's another story.

So Tolstoy wrote, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

My response: All unhappy people are alike; every happy person is happy in their own way.

More to follow.

I decided that this would be the summer I read Anna Karenina. A couple years ago I'd gotten about a hundred pages in before getting confused by the Russian nicknames and surnames and giving up. Plus, for Christmas my mom got me a novel called Tolstoy Lied (referencing the famous "Happy families" first line of Anna Karenina) so I wanted to read the original before finding out if/how he was wrong. On my last trip to Myopic, I found a cheap copy and knew that the time had come. I've been working on it for maybe two weeks and am halfway through. The names have been much easier, possibly due to the way this is translated (the famous first line was different than I'd ever heard it, for starters). But there is one problem that I really did not expect.

I don't like the book.

Reading it feels like a chore. I was expecting a sweeping epic about love and life, and although I do find the romance plotlines compelling, overall the book is falling flat. I don't want to abandon it again, but there are so many other books I'd rather delve into. Somehow I haven't gotten pulled past the surface, to really sympathize with the characters and their dilemmas.
These are just my midpoint thoughts. If there are any Tolstoy fans or scholars in the audience who can give me advice on finishing, please speak up. Just don't give anything away!

                I want to quote the last line of James Joyce’s story “The Dead.” I want to share it with someone, to praise the beauty of its realization. I want to say it out loud so you can appreciate the perfect balance of the words, of the sounds that compose those words. But I realize that to just throw some text on the screen in front of you, without letting you experience the whole story before reading those final words, would be criminal. So I’ll tell you about them instead.

                I read Dubliners for a class on James Joyce in the final quarter of my senior year at college. The reading list included that book of short stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. It was my first exposure to Joyce’s work. Like a true nerd, I was very excited, mostly about reading what many have called the greatest book ever written. But we began with the less experimental short stories.

                The instructor for the class was a visiting professor from Ohio: Morris Beja, a Joyce scholar. He didn’t strike me as a teacher. He was a short, old man, dressed in a suit and glasses every day. He had a raspy New York voice that revealed a smoker’s past, and in my mind he would chase down each cigarette with a tumbler of whisky. Everything about him reminded me of a cop out of a movie from the thirties, something with Humphrey Bogart. But instead of talking about crooks and guns and dames, he spoke about literature.

                After the first session of class I knew that I was going to enjoy this one. I dove into Dubliners that night. It took me only a few days to finish the whole thing. One of my favorite things about being an English major was that when you had a good professor and a good reading list, your homework never felt like work.

                I enjoyed many of the stories, but the one that left the strongest impression on me was definitely the last. It started, like the rest of them, with an unremarkable setting: a party. The more pages I turned, though, the more complex it became. It would be a grave injustice to try to do a mere recap of the plot. But when I read the last story, the last paragraph, the last line, my reaction was “Wow.” Ineloquent amazement. I turned back a page and reread a bit of it, marveling at how simple yet profound it was, a perfect narrowing from beginning to ultimate end. It’s…oh just go read it yourself.

                It fits in with Joyce’s plan for all of the Dubliners stories. They were written as a tribute to his beloved city (in case you couldn’t tell from the title). He almost published the collection without that final tale, but thankfully decided that he hadn’t quite conveyed to his liking the concept of Irish hospitality. This idea plays no small part in the story, but it is so much more than just a portrait of a city’s citizens. All of these stories are epiphanies for the characters.

I specify ‘for the characters’ because several of these stories have infuriatingly open-ended conclusions. I found this was particularly true in the beginning, where the first four stories ended and I knew that something had clicked, something was revealed to the character in question. I didn’t know what it was, but the character did somehow, even though they couldn’t express it. The rest of the collection varies in the subject and depth of final revelations. Some are about marriage, politics, religion, or wealth. Some are small sighs of resignation; others are life-changing blazes that might purify or consume.           

Under Professor Beja’s guidance we drew out the themes of the stories. If you didn't love the book on your own, this gruff old man's enthusiasm would have done it. Every day, listening to him talk, I wondered how he came to devote his life and his scholarship to one author. He showed us slides from his own trips to Dublin and told us stories from Joyce conventions. (Yes, apparently those are quite popular with the lit professor set.) The class revolved more around his lectures than student discussion; I was more than happy to listen to him talk. He knew everything about those three books. As I look over my notes now from the two weeks we devoted to Dubliners, two words that keep cropping up are escape and loneliness. We talked about these as themes that tied together the stories even though very few characters and plots overlap. In fact, my dad once told me that Dubliners is one of his favorite books for just that reason: the stories stand alone and as parts of an overarching whole. Again, I don’t think it’s fair to lecture you on a book you’ve never read, but it’s interesting to note that escape and loneliness should be cornerstones in a book about a city, about people. And maybe that’s why “The Dead” makes such an impact as the coda of this collection. On the level of pure technique, it is the most masterful. In the realm of the spiritual, it is the most profound epiphany.

I returned to "The Dead" on the train this morning and finished it on my lunch break. That's when I noticed how amazing that last line was, which then led me down this twisted path of piecemeal memories. And that reaction is just as much of a tribute to the power of a good story as it is for me to swoon over it in writing of my own. When faced with something so overwhelming, sometimes the most expressive reaction is just, “Wow.”