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 10-15: Manning Up

One thing about Anna Karenina that took me by surprise is how chick-litty it can be. I've barely scratched the surface, and I've already encountered ballroom dancing, lovestruck princesses, weepy tête-à-têtes,  detailed descriptions of gowns, and sentences like this:

Yet, while she looked like a butterfly clinging to a blade of grass, and just about to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight, her heart ached with a horrible despair.

I am speaking as someone who has the entire Sound of Music soundtrack memorized when I say that just typing that sentence made my mouth taste like caramel syrup. There's nothing wrong with a tea party or five, but I've also been wondering when I was going to be able to break out my album of "Misc. Manly Stuff" images for the blog.

Like Olympic athletes! They're the epitome of manly...oh, wait.

My wait is over. Today I plunged into a testosterone-scented pool of hunting expeditions, sex with beautiful women, sowing fields, and -

Hold on. Sex? Yes, that's right, Anna finally gives in and gets it on with Vronsky, after "almost a year" of wheedling. I had to read the part that says this about five times to make sure that it actually happened, because Tolstoy is extremely subtle in his language on this subject. (Or maybe reading Lady Chatterly's Lover in the seventh grade permanently desensitized me to the treatment of coital relations in literature.) He dwells a lot longer on the immediate aftermath, which involves Anna sobbing in all-consuming shame and Vronsky thinking about her in weirdly morbid metaphors.

But in spite of all the murderer's horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what the murderer has gained by his murder.

The full description is so unsettling that I can't bring myself to insert the clever joke about la petite mort that would otherwise be mandatory. Let's just say that neither had the kind of reaction desirable to their situation, and that Anna should have received sufficient red flags by now that this affair is probably not going to end happily.

Most of these chapters aren't about Vronsky and Anna, though. They're about Levin. More specifically, Levin putting aside his disappointment over the failure of Operation Snag Kitty and developing mad skills in the field of agricultural theory. Sometime I'm going to have to borrow one of those Ag students that N.C. State is crawling with and get a full explanation for his elaborate "human character as a factor in farming equations" idea. Until then, I'll just assume it's brilliant, since he frequently complains that no one else on the farm knows what the heck they're doing. Oh, and before I forget, is Levin an example of manliness, or what? Working like a freakin' Horatio Alger character to dominate in his career field, now that's manly.

Let's hear it for masculine domination of the corporate ladder! What? Well, that's awkward...

Then, what d'you know, Stepan drops by for a hunting-slash-business trip in the country. He's his usual self: hearty appetite, cheery temperament, comparisons of women to bakery items. It's interesting that Levin values him so much as a friend, even when he is completely taken aback by his Stepan's elaboration on the delights of marital infidelity. I have to admit that I'm not sure to what to think about this now that Anna is guilty of the same transgression. Is Stepan less guilty because he genuinely doesn't believe it's wrong, while Anna feels strongly that it is and gives into her temptation anyway? Is Anna more innocent because she feels regretful afterward? Or is adultery just adultery?

Maybe Stepan and Levin get along because they both like hunting. And hey, fighting through a forest to shoot animals and watch them bleed their tiny lives out onto the grass has to be the epitome of manhood.

I give up.

Thanks to today's Official Lit Dish, you can enjoy Russian-style marinated mushrooms just like the kind that Stepan and Levin enjoyed. In pictures, they look exactly like the kind in Rams Head Dining Hall at UNC, which are my third-favorite salad bar item after the hummus and Turkish figs.