Zibby Mag

By Nicole C. Kear

“I can’t believe you’ve never read Anna Karenina,” I said to my husband. “It’s life-changing.”

We were driving back to Brooklyn from Philly — a rare car trip free of children, which is why we were able to discuss Russian literature rather than, say, the merits of Descendants 2 over Descendants 3. I wore a large, unsightly medical patch over my left eye because I’d had surgery the day before and I was cheerful and optimistic, having just been the recipient of a minor miracle. No one would ever be able to fix my broken eyes but a doctor had at least removed the cataracts that clouded my vision — cataracts that had developed a full forty years ahead of schedule, thanks to my retinal disease.

“I’ve read The Brothers Karamazov,” my husband replied. “And that didn’t change my life.”

“This is different,” I insisted. “I know you’d love it — ooooh!” I turned to him, placing a hand on his arm. “We should read it together!”

He glanced over at me and made a face. Even with only one eye, I could see that it was not the face I’d been hoping for.

“Is this like when you told me we should read Finnegan’s Wake together?” he asked. “And then you stopped reading after five pages and I was stuck reading the whole thing because you know I’ll never put a book down once I’ve started it?”

“I was in graduate school,” I said. “I didn’t have time to read whole books. Plus, five pages of Finnegan’s Wake is plenty.”

“What about when you convinced me to read In Search of Lost Time and you gave up halfway through the first book?” he said. “But I was on the hook to read seven volumes?”

“But I’ve already finished Anna Karenina,” I said. “And it was The One. My great book love.”

In fact, Anna Karenina wasn’t just a book to me. It was the literary landscape against which a formative chapter of my life unfolded. In the same way that smelling Drakkar Noir shoots me back into a dorm room with my college boyfriend, hearing a mention of Anna Karenina brings me to the summer when everything changed. It was the right book at the right time in the right place, a perfect confluence of forces that led to an unforgettable reading experience.

It began during the summer after my sophomore year in college, on a plane ride to Italy. I was at a crossroads, having recently received a diagnosis that radically impacted my future. Without knowing it, I’d been living with a degenerative retinal disease that had been slowly eating away at my sight — attacking my night-time vision first, and then my peripheral vision. Since there was no cure or treatment, this process would continue and it was anybody’s guess how much vision I’d lose and how quickly.

In the wake of this sudden diagnosis, I’d begun thinking of myself as a Tragic Heroine, like Anna Karenina herself. I made an ambitious list of things I wanted to experience while I still had all five senses, and topping the list was a Grand Romance.

I was the perfect reader for the novel — hungry for romance, fetishistic of tragedy, and fortunate enough to have tons of time to read.

As the summer days stacked up, so too did the pages of the novel. I was about a third through the book when I headed out of my borrowed apartment in Rome one night to read under a bright streetlamp in Piazza Navona. I’d only gotten through a few pages when I heard a man’s voice.

“That’s a good one.” The voice spoke in English with an Italian accent so knee-buckling it should’ve been accompanied by smelling salts.

I glanced up to see a tall, lanky man standing next to me. He had melted chocolate eyes and close-cropped black hair. From where I was sitting, he looked an awful lot like Count Vronsky. Of course, I was night-blind, so probably not the most reliable authority.

Five minutes into our conversation — he insisted on speaking impeccable English and I insisted on speaking what I hoped was impeccable Italian — he asked if I’d like to get a drink. And just like that, I’d found my way into a Grand Romance of my very own. Turns out Tolstoy makes an incomparable wingman.

As any reader of Epic Romances knows, nothing stokes the fire of desire more than the impossibility of consummation. Tolstoy knew this better than anyone. My Italian Vronksy hailed from Northern Italy and was in Rome only briefly on business. Rather than fast-track to the end of our story, we drew it out, parting ways later that evening after nothing more than a kiss in the viale in front of my apartment. We exchanged phone numbers and commenced a string of flirtatious phone calls where his accent gave him an undue advantage. When he invited me to visit his hometown not far from Venice, I accepted.

In the same way that smelling Drakkar Noir shoots me back into a dorm room with my college boyfriend, hearing a mention of Anna Karenina brings me to a summer when everything changed.

I read Anna Karenina the whole train ride up to Venice, enraptured by the chemistry between Anna and Vronsky. The flushed cheeks, the secret rendezvous. I was primed for an epic love affair by the time my train pulled into the station.

Unfortunately, the romance which awaited me could not, even generously, be called epic. It could barely be called a romance. After a few hours with my suitor, I realized his allure was front-loaded, like a piece of bubble gum. For the first few chews, the taste is so explosive and powerful, it overwhelms you. But after a few minutes, you can’t ignore the fact that what’s in your mouth isn’t a strawberry or a blue raspberry but a piece of rubber, barren of flavor or interest — almost unbearable to tolerate a second longer.

I was scheduled to stay in Venice through the weekend, but I left after just one day. On the train ride back to Rome, I was suffused with disappointment by my failed Venetian romance. I felt intensely the sense of time running out, and I worried I’d never find the love I so desperately sought. Then I cracked open Anna Karenina and had what I can only describe as a hypnotic experience.

I’d become all too familiar with the experience of losing myself in a book — it was part of what I loved most about reading. But that night on the train, I read for hours and hours, pulled so deeply into Anna’s world that I lost track of time, and my surroundings, and myself, really. When my train finally slowed, approaching Rome’s Termini, I looked up and found my car nearly empty. It had been daytime when I boarded the train and now it was night, the sky a velvet black. I felt disoriented, the way you do when you wake in an unfamiliar room, and it takes you a few seconds to remember what series of events led to the moment you’re in.

I remember precious little about the plot or characters or prose of Anna Karenina. What I remember, though, is how I felt when I got off the train that night, like the book had washed me clean.

It was many more weeks before I finished the novel, during my final days in Italy. When I reached the scene in which Anna throws herself onto the tracks, I wasn’t on a train myself, but leaning against an ancient wall on a hilltop. My summer was coming to a close and my adult life was waiting back at home, a future full of unknowns. After I read the last page, I sat there against that wall, staring at the horizon for a long, long time.

Fast-forward two decades, to January 2020, as I sat next to my husband in the car on our way home from Philly. Turns out, I found my Grand Love. He’s a guy who’ll read Joyce’s most unreadable book, and Proust’s never-ending book, and my favorite love story, just because I suggest it.

We started reading Anna Karenina together (him, a print copy, me on audio) a month later. Although Covid is to blame for more than I could ever enumerate, it would be unfair to say it was the reason for my abandonment of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy had lost me when I read the chapter in which Konstantin mows the lawn for roughly a hundred pages.

Midway through that chapter, I flopped down on the bed, next to my husband who had Anna Karenina open on his lap. He had made quite an impressive dent in it.

“I kind of hate this book,” I told him. “Do you?”

He glanced at me over his glasses. “No.”

“Did Tolstoy have an editor?” I ranted. “Anyone to rein him in at all? Who wants to read about lawn mowing for the better part of a day? Right?”

“Don’t tell me you’re jumping ship,” he said. “Again.”

I did jump ship. As soon as we went into our first lockdown in mid-March. Anna Karenina was the exact wrong book at the wrong time in the wrong place. Trapped with my three kids, my grandmother, and my husband, sick with fear about the virus, and the upcoming election, and the general state of the world, I needed something easy. Light. A cotton candy read, the kind that just melts in your mouth. Something that would take me away, the way Anna Karenina did twenty years before, but couldn’t anymore.

Recently though, my teenage daughter asked me for a book recommendation, and I suggested Anna K: A Love Story, a modern, YA retelling of Tolstoy’s novel, set in New York City.

“It looks like a lot of fun,“ I told my daughter. “I’ll read it with you.”

Ironically, it was my daughter who gave up on the book this time, while I’m still reading it, and thoroughly enjoying myself. I don’t lose myself in the book the way I did that night on the train. But then again, I haven’t felt that way with any book before or since.

My husband finished the novel, the way he always does, page by page, week after week, pandemic or no pandemic. He liked it. It didn’t change his life.

You can’t go home again, according to Thomas Wolfe. A lesser-known but equally true corollary is this: You can’t re-read the book that changed your life. Or, at least, I don’t recommend it.

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Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s), chosen as a Must-Read by People, Amazon, Martha Stewart Living, Parade, Redbook, and Marie Claire UK among others. Her books for children include the middle-grade novel Foreverland, the chapter book series The Fix-It Friends, and the middle-grade series The Startup Squad, co-written with Brian Weisfeld (all published by Macmillan Kids’ Imprint).

Her essays appear in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, New York, Psychology Today, Parents, as well as Salon, Huffington Post, and xoJane. She teaches non-fiction writing at Columbia University and the NYU School of Professional Studies.

A native of New York, she received a BA from Yale, a MA from Columbia, and a red nose from the San Francisco School of Circus Arts. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, three children, and a menagerie of small pets.