How would you feel if the person of your dreams fell wildly in love with you? How would you feel if every time you saw that person they gave you butterflies and made you laugh? How about if they were honest, kept no secrets, and lavished you with the perfect amount of attention and affection? If you were never bored with this person and that they always revved your engine?
Imagine that’s your reality, but your family and friends told you that you couldn’t be with this person. No, this isn’t a Romeo and Juliet tale; this is quite a different story.
This is the story of Anna Karenina, the celebrated tale from the 1800s. It’s about a woman who finds perfect love while living in imperfect circumstances. It is the story of Anna who is both moral and immoral, sweet and sassy, a woman who seeks advice but who then refuses to listen to it. Anna sounds like the modern girl, sometimes polished and proper but other times raw and unrestrained. As you listen to her story narrated by Golden Globe winning actress Maggie Gyllenhaal on Audible (they’re offering a free 1 month trial), you’ll find yourself both rooting for Anna and against her.
Her marriage to the formally stiff, impassionate bureaucrat, Alexei Karenin has become the ultimate emblem of everything Karenina despises, as it is loveless and false. However, the tastefully reserved, elegant Karenina has no wishes to end her marriage or leave her beloved son… until she meets Alexei Vronsky, the dashing, passionate military officer. To Karenina, Vronsky represents a life she yearns for, filled with passion and affection.
You’ll feel as though you, or a friend, could be in her exact circumstances. The truth is, all of us have been where Anna is — maybe not with a husband, but certainly with a boyfriend (or two). We’ve all searched for true love, sometimes finding it but more often picking through fool’s gold. We’ve wondered when the perfect person–the one with looks, brains, personality, and utter sex appeal–will sweep us off our feet.
But very few of us stop and think about what happens when we do find this person. Do we immediately jump in if the circumstances aren’t right? Do we try to change the circumstances to make them right? What if we know that we have to do wrong for things to be right? Do we still do it?
Nowadays, if you find yourself in an unhappy marriage, you can get a divorce. There are no repercussions such as social exile or the possibility of estrangement from your children. Can you imagine living in the time of Anna Karenina where women married young, and yet divorce was all but unheard of, and women who stepped outside of their marriages became social pariahs? So many women must have missed out on true love.
Anna Karenina will make you ask yourself these questions. Just like Anna, I feel that I’m a moral person, and yet I’m not so sure what I’d do if I felt similarly trapped. Listening to the story, it made me feel her emotions, question my approach to fidelity, and provided fodder for some enlightening conversations with my friends. As I listened to it narrated on Audible, I wondered: what would have happened if I met my hubby (who is fortunately the man of my dreams) while I was stuck in a loveless relationship? What would I have done?
What would you have done if you were in that situation? This story will help you answer that question.
Now imagine that the man you fall for is also married. Does the inevitability of destroying another woman’s life change things? Would you stuff those feelings down and ignore them, as Anna’s husband (much more poetically) requested she do? We may sometimes be tempted to deceive ourselves when it comes to relationships, convincing ourselves that the one we’re with is “the one,” even if we suspect, deep down, that something isn’t quite right. But is self-deception ever a good thing?
Another wrinkle in this story is the blatantly sexist double standard; while Anna is cast as a “depraved woman” and shunned from society, her lover is distraught, yes, but never overly apologetic. When his friend chides him, he jokingly calls his friend a “moralist,” implying that the entire situation is to be taken lightly, despite his wife’s inconsolability. This demonstrates the double standard that is still alive and well today; that “boys will be boys” but women who commit the same adulterous or sexual acts as men are labeled as a “slut,” “bitch,” or somehow socially devious and therefore an unworthy individual.
If you want to engage with an entertaining tale that will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you question right and wrong, look no further than Anna Karenina on Audible, my fav source to listen to the best books on the go (which is always!).
Speaking of audiobooks, I love listening to them while driving. On long plane, train or automobile rides, nothing is more absorbing than listening to a good book. When I’m sitting in traffic in an Uber, I find myself lost in a spectacular story rather than listening to the persistent sirens, construction noises and honking.
So the next time you’re looking for an escape, your next adventure is only a click away….
I 100% agree with this article! It’s one of my favourite audiobooks that I got from Audible. ☺️ Loved the reader’s voice and how she read the book so adequately! 5/5
Never tried Audible but I will, because I’ve recently discovered that I love love LOVE the combination of reading and listening to these huge works of classic literature, particularly those that have been translated by great translators. There’s just something about physically seeing the translator’s work on a respective author’s work, seeing and identifying the choices said translator would have had to make in the process, and then changing it up with listening to the words, how they sound, that makes the book-enjoyment process somehow more electric for me.
It’s wonderful to see a magazine have reviews for audiobooks. As someone who consumes a lot of novels on audiobooks, I find this feature of Urbanette extremely useful. ?
Great piece about this wonderful novel. I think it’s time I get me a audible account and enjoy it as an audio experience too! Thanks, Hilary!
For three months I lived in South Woodford and worked in Hounslow, driving there and back each day. A long, tedious journey. Then someone gifted me an audible version of Anna Karenina on the mobile app. Suddenly each journey was a delight, something to look forward to. The written version followed and I remain eternally grateful to the person who introduced me to this great novel. ?
OMG! I’ll definitely get the audiobook! Really enjoyed the novel. I was left with pondering the loneliness of the character of Anna, and that we are all incomprehensible to each other. We all die alone. ?
While I enjoyed the audio book, I did feel that it would have benefited from a good editor. Madame Bovary deals with a similar theme far more succinctly and successfully, and without the self-indulgent digressions into Russian agricultural policy which are a tedious chore for the reader. Flaubert sticks to the drama and reads like a thriller in comparison with Tolstoy.
Anna Karenina is one of my favourite novels of all time. Part of its essential honesty and believability may come from the fact that it is based at least in part on Tolstoy’s own life — the courtship of Levin and Kitty mirrors his own courtship of Sonya Behrs, down to the harrowing moment when he, in good faith but with little common sense, gives her his diaries to read, making a pious and sheltered girl learn in detail about his trysts with prostitutes and peasants — a shock from which his real-life wife confessed she never recovered. The scene of Kitty’s long and painful confinement, also based on one of Sonya’s, is extremely moving as well.
It seems to exist within its own parameters and you do wonder what they are. Enjoyable finesse compared to the doting mom and pop of experimental writing – stream of consciousness (modernism) and authorial self-reference (post-modernism).
Good article. I’ve just finished rlistenning to AK for the first time only a few weeks ago, and was struck by how amazing it was! There’s head-hopping galore, and amazing dialogue. The Levin/Kitty relationship and marriage is my favourite. My feeling is that he didn’t plot the book, but let his characters lead him. I loved it.