Part II, Chapters 30-35: Germany is the Best Medicine

After a hiatus almost entirely dedicated to college move-in, I returned to Anna Karenina in a mood as stormy as a North Carolina summer night. Half of this could be attributed to the big toe that was aching long after I dropped my book-loaded ottoman on it. The rest came from not wanting to deal with the whole Vronsky/Anna/Alexei situation right then. I'm a believer in characters suffering - as many writers have pointed out, it's the only way to make readers fall in love with them - but all the cheating and dying and unplanned pregnancy was getting me down. And why would anyone want to kick off one of the best years of their life (the light blue brochures I received in the mail were very firm on this point) feeling like they got their heart rammed through a shredder?

Freshman year was bad enough.

But when I turned to Chapter 30, salvation arrived in the unlikely form of Kitty Shcherbatsky, whose exploits in a German "watering hole" - which here refers to a health spa, and not a socializing area for elephants, so get that scene from The Lion King out of your head - are so delightfully silly that they read almost like a separate book. Kitty makes friends, Kitty finds religion, Kitty attracts the attention of a married man...all of which dissolves by the end of Part II. It's like Eat, Pray, Love meets The Baby-sitters Club Super Special: Guten Tag, Germany! Except that Kitty's fascination with strangers comes across as more creepy than cute.

...Kitty, as often happened, felt an inexplicable attraction to Mademoiselle Varenka...The more attentively Kitty watched her unknown friend, the more convinced she was that this girl was the perfect creature she fancied her, and the more eagerly she wanted to make her acquaintance.

For the record, Varenka is a pale and ageless-looking girl who likes to hang around dying people. If the word "vampire" immediately jumped into your head, you get brownie points for being right on my wavelength. Unfortunately, as Bram Stoker was still an unpaid theater critic in the 1870s, any vampiric subtext in Anna Karenina is anachronous and not intentional on Tolstoy's part.

But there's always this steampunk rewrite to tide us over.

Varenka would be much more interesting if she were a soulless and tormented creature of the night. She's a cloyingly sweet character, the kind you secretly wish would suffer a horrible demise in the style of Mark Twain's "Good Little Boy." Kitty can't get over how "wonderfully sweet" it is that Varenka devotes her life to taking care of her invalid adopted mother and other sickly aristocrats. Moreover, they share the burden of rejection by a suitor, a fact that astounds Kitty:

"Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone else after knowing you."

Whatever the reader wants to make of that quote  (I've already addressed the issue of possible lesbian undertones in the novel), Varenka captivates Kitty in a way that Anna might have earlier, had the Vronsky conflict not ensued to disrupt it. Our Princess Spitfire - remember her awesome denouncement of the misogynistic social system? - morphs into a Good Little Girl in the space of a chapter. And while there's nothing wrong with martyrly ideals or caring for the sick, it's more a product of her Varenka-worship than a genuine sense of morality.

Sort of like how I listen to terrible wrock music out of pure Potter devotion.

Kitty's attempt to become a different person worked out about as well as Michael Jackson's. The impoverished artist she nurses through illness develops an adulterous longing for his "sister of mercy"; Varenka's suffering mother is revealed to be a selfish snoot. Then Kitty goes all "Born This Way" on Varenka in a moment of pure Emersonian awesomeness.

"Yes, yes, I know you're all perfection; but what am I to do if I'm bad? This would have never been if I weren't bad. So let me be what I am, but not to be a sham...I can't act except from the heart..."

By the time Kitty returns to Russia, she's blossomed into the hypocrisy-hating, take-me-as-I-am-or-let-me-go grrl who we all know was lurking under those ruffled petticoats all along. She's gotten over her relationship drama - aside from a brief pang upon running into Levin's obnoxious brother at one point - and her mysterious illness (if they are, indeed, distinct). She's also developed a taste for plum soup, which is an Official Lit Dish that I will not be making anytime soon. Even my adoration of literary-inspired food preparation doesn't justify kicking all my hallmates out of the dorm kitchen to boil a giant pot of plums.

Ramen experimentation is a different story.

Stay tuned for Part III! It looks like there's a lot of Loverboy Levin, so my hopes are high.

Part II, Chapters 1-3: Hello, Kitty

And now we break from the steamy sexual tension of Anna and Vronsky to catch up with Kitty, who was last seen choking back tears as her Big Night spiraled into a living version of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know." Like Levin, she does not easily recover from the pangs of unrequited love. Unlike Levin, her reaction to it is to come down with a mysterious illness that involves "failing strength" and doesn't respond to treatment. Everyone just assumes that Vronsky's rejection left her heartsick, a condition quite common to Unrequited Tragic Maidens in classic literature. It's kind of a wimpy reason to lie in bed all day, but it was more socially acceptable back then.

The modern equivalent is excessive use of Tumblr.

 Except they're only half right. Kitty's sick, all right - sick of the slimy underbelly of high society, to which Vronsky's betrayal opened her eyes.

"If mamma takes me to a ball - it seems to me she takes me only to marry me off as fast as possible, and get me off her hands...These suitors so called - I can't bear the sight of them. It seems to me as if they're always taking stock of me...everything appears to me, in the coarsest, most loathsome aspect."

She's Holden Caulfield, calling out the prep school phonies. She's Nick Caraway, shouting that the East Eggers are a rotten crowd. She's Cinderella, if Cinderella had decided that Prince Charming was totally superficial and divorced him to start her own housekeeping business. She is mad about being objectified and that is awesome.

Even if the chance that she'll pull a River Tam and vent her frustration over an oppressive system into crazy ninja moves is, admittedly, rather low.

The irony is that both of Kitty's parents are obsessing over the Vronsky situation when her sister - Dolly - is dealing with post-childbirth recovery, six kids with scarlet fever, and an AWOL husband who has already started up a new affair after promising it would never, ever happen again. Come to think of it, Dolly gets about as much crap in this part of the book as Levin did earlier. C'mon, Stepan, you can at least lend a hand with the Oblonsky Bunch when you aren't busy with your girlfriend...especially considering that children died from scarlet fever all the time in the 1800s. (One of them was Leo Tolstoy's seven-year-old son, Ivan.)

However, despite the debauchery and reality television-worthy antics in the lives of Tsarist Russian aristocrats, there's one perk that makes me think twice about throwing a Pity Kitty party. Namely, that the doctors recommend going abroad as the best treatment for her condition, and her mom and dad buy into it. Ha! I wish that every time I felt strangely weak, my parents would spring for a trip to Paris or Milan. I'd even take Disney World. Or how about just the Lands in Epcot?

Canadians in kilts playing Celtic rock? I feel better already.

One of the remedies tried on Kitty was iron, which was probably administered in the form of pill supplements invented during the nineteenth century. A much tastier source would have been this granola, made with ultra-healthy blackstrap molasses. It's also one of the Official Lit Dishes that I can easily make in my dorm's kitchen. If only European travel was as accessible as this treatment...

Chapters 18-20: Everybody Loves Anna

Hey there, Other Anna! It's nice to meet you after 70 pages of exposition about your brother and his friends, during which you were mentioned a smidgen more frequently than the latest Kidz Bop CD on Pitchfork's Best New Albums page. From the moment you descended from that train carriage, I was almost as captivated as Vronsky by your gray eyes and dark hair and pale complexion and - hold on, we have all that and a name in common? Talk about discovering your literary doppelganger. Although I doubt that the impressions I inspire at public transportation centers could be described with the words "elegance and modest grace."

This is the only picture I could find of myself in a train station.

Okay, one-way conversation with a fictional character is now over. The reality is, while it's nice that Anna's appearance catalyzes all that exposition into a solid storyline, I find the number of characters who fangirl their hearts out over her to be alarming. Just like everybody hates Levin, everybody adores Anna. Especially other women. Vronsky's crusty old mother, who sat with her on the train, adores her.

"Good-bye, my love," answered the Countess. "Let me kiss your pretty face. I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that I've lost my heart to you."

If that strikes you as the least bit suggestive, then Kitty's reaction to her later on in the story ought to hit you like one of Wile E. Coyote's anvils.

[B]efore Kitty knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna's sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married women.

Whether or not Leo Tolstoy had homosexual attractions himself (his autobiographical work Childhood has some pretty strong implications that he did) that trickled into his portrayal of the female opinion of Anna, he makes it easy for us jaded modern readers to draw slashfic-spawning conclusions. After all, we live in a world where people speculate that a Disney princess is a lesbian because she likes archery and doesn't have a boyfriend. Ultimately, it's best left up to each reader as to whether Anna is the subject of romantic or platonic admiration among her gal pals.

Either way, she's no plain Jane.

After Anna gets off the train and endures some gawking by Vronsky (which spurs his mom to drop references to Anna's husband and son, with all the subtlety of Lady Gaga at an awards show), there's a brief interlude due to a gruesome murder. Yup, a man gets sliced in half after he wanders onto the train track. If this were a Dan Brown novel, the incident would launch a clandestine investigation...but since it's a literary masterpiece well known for being tragic, I'm going to hazard a guess that it's foreshadowing instead. I do know one thing, and that's that there's no way a stinker like Vronsky gave a pile of money to the dead man's widow out of Christian sympathy. This guy is trying to win over Anna through one of the oldest tricks ever.

The kaffeeklatsch that Anna and Dolly have later is disappointing if you held hopes that Stepan would have to suffer a little more for his wrongdoings (guilty as charged).  While Dolly gets her Sylvia Plath-meets-The Hours on for a few exciting moments ("What have I to strive and toil for? Why to have children? What's so awful is that all at once my heart's turned, and I have nothing but hatred for him...") her sister-in-law ultimately convinces her to forgive and forget, because those menfolk just can't help themselves, dontcha know.

I would've made her sit through my Girl Power Ballad playlist.

Chapter 20 concludes with the promise of a ball, where there will have to be at least one realization of passionate love, as ordained by the Laws of Balls in Literature. I have a hunch that, based on the sparks already flying between Anna and Vronsky, it will leave Kitty a lot less giddy than she is now. In the meantime, she'd better stay away from this post's Official Lit Recipe, no-bake espresso cookies in honor of Anna and Dolly's heart-to-heart over a coffee tray. She's definitely worked up enough over her first dance of the season without any extra caffeine pumping through her system.

 I'll part with the melancholy quip that Kitty's enthusiasm prompts from our heroine. I think many college students can relate to Anna's words as the scary thing known as Real Life looms before us:

This mist [of happiness], which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower...

Chapters 1-5: No Anna, Lots of Jude Law

I am not going to start this by quoting Anna Karenina's famous first line, which is controversial and has inspired its own sociological and statistic principle. Instead, here's a good reason to put this Incredible Hulk of a novel on your reading list: the chapters are short. This might have nothing to do with the actual content of the book, but it makes it a heck of a lot easier to take a break and watch the London 2012 swimming races until Missy Franklin's adorable face is tattooed on your eyelids.

Like the NBC Olympics coverage, Anna Karenina has a greater ratio of political endorsements to teary-eyed young women than I was expecting.

 Anyway, because of the mini-chapters, the first 24 pages weren't painful at all, despite the fact that the title character hasn't actually put in an appearance yet. Nope, so far it's been all about how Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky (henceforth known as Stepan) has cheated on his wife, Darya "Dolly" Alexandrovna Oblonsky, with the French governess. That's right: over 130 years before Jude Law made headlines for cavorting behind Sienna Miller's back with his children's nanny, Stepan is trying to win back his woman's favor. The best part of this storyline is that Jude Law is in the upcoming Anna Karenina  movie, even though he plays a different character. Unfortunate implications much? I wonder if he's read the script.

Jude Law is also the voice of Lemony Snicket in the Series of Unfortunate Events movie. As mentioned before, the central theme of Anna Karenina is a plot point in the books. COINCIDENCE OVERLOAD.

 This might come across as somewhat romantic if Stepan actually loved Dolly and felt bad about screwing up. The reality is he's just concerned that she won't be able to run the household properly if she stays mad at him. Even though this is sort of accurate, because their youngest kid has already gotten sick from "unwholesome soup" that her Super Mom powers would apparently have detected otherwise, it definitely puts him in my Literary Chauvinistic Male Pig category beside un-studs like Rhett Butler and any Hemingway hero ever. Let's just say that I was cheering when Dolly ripped him a new you-know-what in a takedown on par with Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."

You are loathsome to me, repulsive! Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you have neither a heart nor a sense of honor! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger - yes, a complete stranger!

...and then she has inward angst about still loving him. But at least she shows some spirit...unlike her husband. For a man who writes racy letters to his French maid-slash-mistress, Stepan is a pretty bland character. He just putters along at his high-end government job (which he got through pure nepotism) and his high-end social life (which he got through being a rich prince and not arguing with people).

Not this kind of prince. Nineteenth-century Russia, like Saudi Arabia, had lots of princes, most of whom didn't inherit the throne or have weddings that inspire graphic novels.

 Tolstoy does more than imply that Stepan is an example of the complaisance that comes with being a member of the bourgeoisie; he calls him out directly for choosing the political affiliation that best suits his lifestyle. Stepan doesn't like traditional family life, going to church, or challenging the media, so - ta da! - he's a liberal.

And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.

Hands up, everyone who heard Glenn Beck's voice reading that quote in their head. Somehow I suspect that Tolstoy's views are more in line with Stepan's friend Levin, the earnest but uncultured country boy who thinks that government bureaucracy is ruining everything. As of the end of Chapter 5, they have dinner plans. Is it too much to hope that a tantalizing secret emerges over coffee?

Maybe Stepan/Levin was the Joey/Chandler of its time.

 Speaking of coffee, people in this book are always drinking it, just like in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Since I believe in immersive literary experiences AKA excuses to eat while reading, I Googled "Russian coffee." All the recipes that came up seemed to involve vodka, which a) is not part of my diet and b) is not the best thing to imbibe when most of the characters have easily confused fourteen-letter names. So my Official Lit Dish recommendation for this chapter is a warm mug of your favorite coffee or tea (the latter of which was actually more popular throughout Russian history, even after Peter the Great introduced the "cup of joe" concept to the nation). If you're feeling adventurous, pair it with a delicious scone made from all the canned pumpkin that's been sitting in the pantry since the after-Thanksgiving grocery store sale.

Oh, and what does any of this have to do with Anna Karenina herself? She's Stepan's sister. I'm sure all this will tie into her story...eventually.