Customer Reviews

What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you've read Tolstoy's Karenina you more or less know what to expect of the plot. Unhappily married woman has an affair, abandons her family and so on and so forth. There is more to this book than that.

Anna K comes from a Russian Jewish community in Rego Park but at no point does she feel as if she belongs. A misfit who loves literature and dreams of being the inspiration for the next great work of literature, she settles for wealth and marries Alex, a successful Russian businessman; has a child who she is not terribly attached to and falls for another lover of literature. The secondary plot is of the love between Lev and Katia who belong to the Bukharan Jewish community which still holds tightly to its cultural rules and traditions.

Reyn has trimmed many subplots from the original to create a more streamlined book. Unfortunately the trials of tribulations of the original Anna K do not carry over well into this age of emancipation. Divorce is no longer the taboo it was in Tolstoy's time and a languishing, unemployed, dependent and unhappy woman in the modern age can be hard to sympathise with. Anna's choices seem odd in this day and age. She marries Alex for his money, is often a contemptuous snob and at best is a dreamer who works very hard to sabotage her own happiness.

Reyn's writing, though, is wonderful. Her control of language, her ability to draw a picture with words and her creation of a window into the Russian immigrant communities in Queens is excellent. The story of Lev and Katia (Levin and Kitty in the original) is well drawn. The Bukharan community that they belong to, with its rules, chauvinistic attitudes and codes of honor were fascinating.

As a debut novel this work does much to show the author's potential. If the book failed for me it was because the shadow of the original Karenina sat too heavy on it and the character's choices did not translate well into the modern world.

I'll start by saying that it's been years since I read Tolstoy's classic, ANNA KARENINA, the book on which WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K. is a modern "retelling". Therefore, I will not make comparisons and the review will be on this novel as it stands alone.

WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K. is a well written, evocative tale whose central character, Anna K., is a Russian immigrant of Jewish descent living in modern day Queens, N.Y. She is portrayed, interestingly, as a highly self conscious provocateur whose vanity is barely overshadowed by her egocentricity. Somewhat surprisingly, this is not to say she is necessarily lacking in admirable traits. We can certainly sympathize with her struggles of identity, independence, and communal convention. Early in the book, we see Anna as a woman in her mid 20s whose expectations of a mate are the literary amalgam of Heathcliff and Darcy. What she gets, years later, is Alex K., a successful businessman of like heritage who is more inclined toward the pedantic.... Although the union produces a son, the book's predominant theme has little to do with family but rather Anna's romantic relationships and adultery.

Despite the author's ability to tell an excellent story with very well drawn characters, it was sometimes difficult for me to follow the thread that held the fragments/stories together. We have the tale of a rather self obsessed and dispassionate woman who seems to always be looking for a "greener pasture". Money, in this case, is not the motivating force. As the book puts it at one point, Anna is looking for a mate/husband who not only possesses the courage and strength to be a warrior but also the intellectual and literary gifts to then turn around and write about the fight. This journey takes her from Alex to her cousin's fiancé and then, later, to that same cousin's husband (different person). The backdrop to all of this is the force by which society imposes adherence to its conventions and the consequences/alienation that comes from one person's refusal. As indicated above, this debut novel by Ms. Reyn portends good things. I will definitely look for her next.

I just finished Tolstoy's Anna Karenina a few weeks ago, so when I was offered this re-telling of that classic story to review for the Amazon Vine program, the timing was serendipitous.

In this modern version, author Irina Reyn is faithful to the original yet manages to give it a thoroughly fresh, original flavor, and the good news is that although familiarity with Tolstoy's Anna will make Reyn's version all the more enjoyable in making the inevitable connections and comparisons, I don't believe it necessary to have read Tolstoy to enjoy Reyn's take.

The theme is the same, and it's one whose consequences haven't really changed as much as we might think in the more than 100 years that have passed between tellings. We get to meet Anna here before her marriage to Alex, when she is a 37-year old beauty in a Russian-Jewish enclave of NYC, lovely and admired, cultured and educated, but troublingly single. Things haven't really changed much in society, and less so in immigrant populations, where a 37-year old single woman in danger of never marrying or having children is a crisis. So she marries.

She knows from the beginning that she feels no passion for her husband either physically or emotionally, but finds comfort in the securities of marriage and motherhood. When she meets David, their affair brings to light all of the ways Anna has covered up her own sense of self, but what I got from it was even more alarming: the more glaring fact that that may very well be due to the fact that there is perhaps not much there to cover up. For Anna is, underneath her elegant and mysterious demeanor, empty and unremarkable. What does she really care about? Is there anything at all that moves her the same way novels and politics do David, the way French movies affect Lev, her cousin's husband? Even her young son, although deeply loved, arouses no unbridled emotion in Anna. She has spent most of her life primarily engaged in two things: dreaming vaguely about flawed but romantic heroes like Bronte's Heathcliff, and creating her image of the stylish Russian beauty everyone believes she is. She has never tried too hard to achieve or do anything in particular, and that empty space is what no husband, child, or lover can fill. The tragedy of Anna is that she never sees this, because she's incapable of looking at herself through her own eyes. It's as if she herself has no eyes at all with which to judge anyone or anything, even herself. Having chosen her lover over her husband and child, her life quickly loses what little focus it had. In her forties now and living with a younger man whose love she's unsure of, she spirals downward into depression over all that she has lost - her beauty, youth, time, her husband, son, respectability, community, and now the lover for whom she'd left it all. What's left? She has no reservoir to dip into, and don't we all need that? If nothing else, we need that part of ourselves that is uniquely US, that takes comfort in our own company, that draws strength and inspiration from within, like an internal bank account we deposit bits of confidence and other good things into from time to time, when we can, saving it for the rainy days that come for all of us at some point. Anna has never done this, and so there's nothing there when all the external things are gone.

The one thing I felt was poorly done, and is the sole reason I give this book four stars instead of five, is the very abrupt and unclear ending. I don't do spoilers so won't give anything away, but suffice it to say that if you have NOT read Tolstoy's story, the end may leave you with a giant question mark over your head. Then again, maybe not and I'm just naturally thick. I know it would have frustrated me, though, had I not known how Anna Karenina ended and assumed this ended the same way (and who knows - maybe it DIDN'T end the same way...that's how obscure the ending is!). Although this faltering at the very end (literally the last page) is no small thing, I found this story evocative and well-written in a sparse, sincere tone. I liked the fact that there were no drawn-out or graphic details of the couple's affair, not because I'm opposed to that but because it would have greatly detracted from the story, which is not nearly so much about the affair itself as it is about Anna's emptiness and the repercussions of all the decisions - and lack of decisions, really - she's made in her life. I would still recommend it, and for those who are fans of Tolstoy's original tale, as I am, it will be especially satisfying.

Irina Reyn's debut updates Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina with a certain hip aplomb. Moving this story from Old Russia to New York's enclaves of immigrant Russian Jews makes a nice flourish. But these characters, with their relentless carping and moaning, their self-destructive and unsympathetic immoderation, leave me cold. Reading this novel is a joyless labor for only trivial reward.

For those who haven't read the original, Anna K (we never learn what the K stands for) is the unhappy wife of an older, successful man of affairs. When a dashing younger man storms into her life, she has no scruple stealing him from her beloved cousin. The cousin, subsequently, is courted by a devoted but unexciting man. When the cousin marries this suitor, her marriage is disillusioning, even as Anna's romance spirals out of her control.

The plot progression is loosely loyal to Tolstoy's fatalistic novel. The characters are locked into patterns that reflects a culture and mentality distinctly their own, with a distinctly pessimistic view of the real world. So I can't blame Reyn for that. But I can blame her that these characters whine so unremittingly through the entire story.

Anna begins the novel whining that she's afraid her impending marriage is a doomed pursuit. Then her whining opens up forward and backward in time for us. Even as she sabotages her marriage through infantile daydreams, she spools back through a shrill history of spotty friendships, ill-considered romances, battles with her parents, and more. And when she wins the hand of her debonair lover, she moans about all she's had to give up for him, too. All through the book, endlessly moaning.

Meanwhile Lev, who will marry Anna's cousin Katia, starts off moaning that she's so beautiful that he can't bring himself to approach her. Then he gripes that his marriage isn't the golden age he anticipated. He whimpers when he doesn't get enough sex, then whimpers when he gets too much. He grumbles that life isn't as glamorous as his favorite French art films. But his whining reaches a new pinnacle when he starts having sexual fantasies about Anna K.

All this is interspersed among character-building scenes and exposition that appear less based on life than on exercises assigned in postgraduate writing classes. Ensemble members respond the way they're supposed to, not in an organic, humane manner. Seven years of events are packed into less than 250 pages, with the result that chapters are very short, built of even shorter scenes cut together with MTV abruptness that doesn't permit a rounded development of character.

This book has promise. And in fairness, it has minutes of surprising tenderness: Lev and Katia's first time as husband and wife, Anna's pain being torn away from her son. But overall, Tolstoy's pioneering realistic novel has been supplanted by unappealing characters, oppressive scenes, and drab execution. We who read for fun should go reread the original. At least in that one, when Anna gave into despair in her final scenes, I was able to bring myself to care.

Irina Reyn, in her novel What Happened to Anna K, transports Tolstoy's story to modern day New York. While there are efforts to give the story the passion of its original, its lack of development and its flimsy characterization outweigh all these attempts and leave the reader with a lukewarm feeling.

My biggest complaint with Reyn's update of the classic Anna Karenina is that it lacks depth and represents only a superficial story of what it could have been. It is stripped down quite a bit, and the character development is only at surface level. There are attempts to give glimpses into what Anna, Lev, and Katia are thinking or experiencing, but these moments seem to lead into ramblings and minute details which detract from the story. A certain amount of contrived scenes dominate the down parts of the chapters. Then, there are also moments when the story comes across as being way too melodramatic and soap opera(ish); instead of giving characters serious depth, there is a constant "nagging" or whining within the development of the story. As readers, often this renders us unsympathetic towards characters and their problems, as it does in this book.

On the plus side, there are moments when Reyn can capture the moments of hopefulness in love amid the problems and distractions within a relationship and marriage. Lev and Katia have some wonderful moments where they learn how to adapt to their marriage; Lev learns that marriage is not the utopia he thought it would be. The author makes an attempt to depict the hopes of characters, but their hopes are so superficial that it takes away the human emotion aspect from a reader's perspective. Overall, I just found this to be a mediocre effort.

This is an easy, chatty, read which offers quick but clarifying glimpses into the thoughts of the characters as the action goes. Some of the conflicts are easier to relate to than others in a modern setting- the importance of virginity for a 26-year-old, for example, is difficult to grasp for most modern readers- but if you have read (or are familiar with) the original Anna Karenina, you can follow the flow of the story without too much suspension of disbelief. However, this is not a straight-up update of the classic, and people looking for such will be disappointed.

One of the things that made Tolstoy's work such a classic was the way he could look at the same moment in the story not only from the perspective of different characters but also use those moments to illustrate different aspects of the same character. Anna is seen as many (at first) as the long-suffering wife who finally, understandably breaks from her stifling older husband in an affair with the passionate, slightly younger Vronsky. Only later do we come to understand that her husband had been somewhat tricked into marrying Anna by an older relative, and that he had good reason to think of himself as having done something of a good deed. Elsewhere, the original Lev is depressive, over-philosophizing, somewhat too earnest, and of course a poor match for the lively, vivacious Katya. Only when he does originally win her hand do we see the slightly bitter, slightly twisted justifications he uses for the choices he makes.

There is some of that here- we see that the updated Anna K. has painfully acquired the persona of the mysterious, elegant femme fatale because from a young age she has been treated as "other" or "immigrant" and she was told by family to forget the person that she used to be before she came to the US, no matter how genuine that person was. Unfortunately, the submersion into books and the perfection of projection of fantasy has left her a shell of a person, with no genuine inner life and no real satisfaction when she achieves her fantasy. Her solution isn't to look further into herself but to literally become a fantasy- much of what propels her to leave her husband is the opportunity to become someone's muse.

The author hints a few times at what lies beneath the surface of the seemingly dull exterior of life, but doesn't have Anna or the other characters explore it. She knows about her husband's former lovers, but doesn't know about his former interests or what his inner life is or was. It isn't until the end of their functional relationship that she realizes what she might have missed, but then it drops.

The character of Lev has been updated to a pharmacist/French film buff. The modern version moves more extremely from "right" to "wrong" than the original. He wants to marry the wrongly slandered Katia and wants to make his parents happy, and is convinced he can have both. However, after meeting Anna, he is consumed with thoughts of her. He, too, idealizes people- Katia, in his mind, is an updated version of a mythical, pure Russian heroine- and is disappointed when the reality is just that.

Just about everyone in this story suffers from over-idealization. The updated Vronsky (David) is here less of a swaggering cad than in the original and he has more genuine feelings for Katia, but he, too, can't relate to her as a person but only as a personification of "the innocent immigrant". Overall, however, he is not nearly as attractive on any level as the original, and only the somewhat muddled back story the author provides about Anna's fascination with teachers and authors explains (in some part) why Anna would be attracted to this person in the first place.

One gets the sense reading this story that what dooms Anna more than anything is her age. The older she gets, the more obsessed she becomes with how much her time is running out and how she needs to start again. She seems to not only age but degrade- where she was dignified in her black dresses and shearling stoles in her mid and late thirties, she is vulgar and cheap in her early forties. This aspect of the story was the hardest to relate to- ageism may be alive and well in the 21st century, but the level to which she felt condemned by her age didn't ring true, especially when so many people her age and older are starting over in this economy.

This isn't so much an update of a classic as it is another version of the conflict between tradition and the American dreams. I think this story would have been better if it had been developed more in that direction, but overall, a pleasant way to pass a few hours.

This novel's attempt to update Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is an intriguing mix that required this reader's effort to get into and stay with it. I almost put it down permanently a few times, but was drawn back in by my curiosity about the vehicle the author would choose for Anna's demise. I love that Tolstoy used the ultimate (and ultimately romantic) Russian vehicle, the train, to move so much of his story. Although the reading was a somewhat satisfying struggle, eventually, the novel's overarching weakness means that it won't land on my "recommend to friends" list.

Reyn didn't delve more deeply into this classic story than the cloying restrictions of Queens' Russian immigrant community. The joy of reading Tolstoy includes his illumination of the human condition. Reyn never explored life's questions, just Anna's neuroses, leaving her without the deeper context that makes Anna's pain bearable to the reader. Consequently, she (and the men in her life) comes off to this reader as simply another self-absorbed New York City neurotic who never considered mental health treatment. In Tolstoy's Russia, the stranglehold on women's condition and class distinctions were literally inescapable. His Anna was as stuck in her narrow choices as were any of Austen's women or even, going more modern, the women of Dangerous Liaisons. Anna K., on the other hand, lives in a country and a century that offer the means for escape to health and happiness, whether physically or spiritually. Anna's sense of being completely stuck in the Russian Jewish community of Queens, NY, although interesting culturally, doesn't sit well for readers familiar with both the strangulating aspects of immigrant culture and the paths out of it, particularly those paths as accessible to thinkers as creative as Anna K. believes she is.

While Reyn's writing offers readers some moments of genuine sensual pleasure (particularly captivating were her evocative descriptions of food, environments, and the older women in the Russian community), they didn't make up for the fact that this is a story that comes across as shallow. In seeking a modern environment that would trap a woman to the point of Anna's desperation, although the Taliban's Afghanistan would be a ghastly and over-the-top choice, it would be a more accurate fit than Queens in the 21st century.

I think this would make an interesting book club choice for groups that include immigrants or those familiar with immigrants' cross-cultural struggles, because I think they would enjoy discussing Anna K.'s plight and choices (and Reyn's treatment of them) more than would Tolstoy fans seeking an updated Anna Karenina.

What Happened to Anna K. by Irina Reyn is touted as a modern day version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. It is and it is not. What it is more than anything, is the telling of a young woman's life, choices and how one has to ultimately deal with said choices.

Anna K. had lived her life on her own terms. However, once she finds herself in her thirties, she feels and many around her feels it is time to make choices. Surely, she is ready to settle down, to bear forth fruit. Meeting Alex, an older prominent business man, seems the perfect choice. She will be settled, married, with no concerns about the mundane day-to-day struggles. Or will she? After meandering through dating and becoming married, Anna is never quite settled, there is a longing, that is ultimately fed by a liason with her cousin's lover. From there Ms. Reyn takes on an inside ride to what happens and potentially could happen when fidelity, longing and simply being overly romantic collides.

I recommend What Happened to Anna K. to all readers who enjoy well-told stories, whether they read the original or not.

Angelia Vernon Menchan

WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K is a well written, fast read that is very worth a reader's time because of its descriptions of the lives and customs of a broad sampling of contemporary Russian Jews living in the NYC area. I admit that this is a culture I had almost no awareness of and the descriptions of life in this community (or actually a couple different Russian Jewish communities we learn about) seem complete and heartfelt. I also appreciated some of the background info that vividly describes Soviet life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Anna herself is a very well rendered (though not always particularly sympathetic) character and I was relieved to see I am not the only reviewer who has never read this novel's classic inspiration, ANNA KARENINA. I do own a copy of that famous novel and the characters and situations in WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K are intriguing enough for me to move the original "Anna" to the top of my "must read in 2008" book list.

A tragic story of one woman who barrels through the lives of all in her path like a voracious, express train, powered primarily by her ego and lust for the approval of any man (anyone's man as well) in her path.

"What happened to Anna K." is inspired, concise, complex, and well written. I could not put this book down once I began to read it.

Irina Reyn, is clearly an author of great talent, insight and inspiration. Watch as she shines the spotlight on the complexities of Russian/Jewish immigrant culture, and artfully constructs the setting in present-day Manhattan. This story is a jewel, and the author is a gem of the greatest quality as well.

This is Truly the best book I have read in several years. Riveting - again, I could not put it down.