Seventy-five percent in, and I feel how I have misjudged it in what I wrote, for at some point since then I tipped over into the point at which fiction resembles magic. I no longer see Tolstoy’s little tricks, how he’s pulling the reader’s strings, but am simply being pulled by them. I’m utterly beguiled;
I’ve forgotten I’m reading in translation. All I feel is how it’s all becoming deeper and somehow stranger and at the same time solid and real. Continue reading
Anna Karenina
On Rereading Anna Karenina
I fulfilled my goal of finishing my revision of The Jane Austen Project — a crucial reason for my silence here. That was back in September, or maybe October, depending on how one defines “finish” and “revision,” but now it is, it is, it is. No longer mine entirely, I am in the process of letting go of it. Nobody explains, in books that tell you how to write a novel, what a problem that really is.
And I can’t help wondering, as I reread Anna Karenina once again, did Tolstoy have this problem? Continue reading
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 