My love affair... with a book

(or... What doesn't kill you, makes you better)


It must have been about three years ago... I walked into the Librairie Champlain, with the uncertain walk of a street-sweeper going into a Channel boutique...
Having moved to Toronto from Romania four years earlier, I had my eyes out for anything that even remotely represented European culture. For a homesick girl like myself, a French bookstore in Toronto qualified as the runner-up to a Bucharest-bound plane ticket...
My anxiety doubled at the realization that I would have to address the bookstore staff in French (duh), an exercise I hadn't practiced much outside of the classroom - pretty shameful for a self-declared Francophone like myself...

I knew of Champlain from my university French professor, and was hoping to find here a book I read a while back, during high-school in Romania - a time when I took pride in my fluency in French. It didn't take me long to recognize the "Livre de Poche" label, and to find "Bonjour tristesse!" by Francoise Sagan. But now that I was here, surrounded by Europe's classics, I was going to take my time wondering around the shelves...

Oh, I wanted to buy many of those wonderful books.. but for some reason I picked up one of the thickest novels I have ever heard of: Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina. You'll probably judge me for having fallen for the cover - but you should take a look at this cover before you speak... I don't know who the painting is actually supposed to represent (there is no reference to the author or title), but there she was: Anna - ravishing, fierce, a bit spiteful, with dark eyes of profound sadness and so proud in her posture and coquetterie, bundled up in her winter fur coat, leather gloves and bracelets, stylish hat with feather and bow, in her carriage, on her way to the theatre perhaps...
I knew her story, I had, of course, seen the movie(s)... but I thought: "I should read this book in French, since I can't read it in Russian; it's a love story and reading it in French will make it even more Romantic".
Actually, I think I already felt an affinity with that woman in the painting, with Anna in fact, and I wanted to know her thoughts on that winter day, in that carriage, on her way to see her lover.. or to run away from him...

In the following days I went through a few pages from the book... my reading was progressing slowly... I was really impatient, I wanted to get to that page where she gets dressed and she gets onto that carriage, that page where her thoughts are all written down, that page where her most secret passion is expressed in words, that page where she finally gets to share her love with Vronski, that page... that page...
But pages came so slow, as Tolstoi switched from one tableau to another, to include both his main characters (Anna and Levine), and there were so many other things happening before we could get to hear Anna, really hear her...
And then my own life got hectic, and school readings started piling up, and projects began to be overdue, and my book was put on a shelf to wait...

I picked it up again in the spring of 2009. I had a hard time putting the pieces back together. There were all of a sudden all these people with long names and nicknames I had forgotten about. But there was also Anna, and Vronski, and Kitty, and Dolly... and so I continued...
This time I couldn't put it aside! The book has traveled with me to Romania and to Hawaii this year, it's been with me to work in my purse every day. I have tried my best to make time for it during my subway ride, lunch break, coffee break, and thesis-writing break.
It wasn't just my eagerness to read, there was also a change of style in Tolstoi's writing (a thing that he himself confessed to); it's as if he finally got to figure out who Anna is, who everybody is in the story. Things are happening so quickly - important things, challenges, death, social mores, illness, children, love, duty, attempted suicide, confessions, implacability...
My heart melted with every page, I felt like I really really understood Anna, and I just couldn't stand how no one else was able to understand her... how Vronski distances himself, how she slowly grows lonelier and sadder despite all the love that she is carrying inside.

I brought up the fact that I was reading Anna over dinner with friends a few weeks ago. I was so surprised by my friend's blunt comment: "I didn't like that book. I didn't understand it. How someone can betray her husband is beyond me". Although I fully appreciate my dear friend's point of view, and I don't necessarily condone Tolstoi's treatment of his heroine, I must take my hat off to him. His novel portrays a gripping drama, a profound story of unexpected love, a terrifying struggle that shakes Anna's soul to its innermost core. I may be biased, I sympathize with her so much sometimes I feel that the only difference between myself and Anna is that I haven't killed myself ('yet' - as another dear friend of mine would say).

Talk about that... there's one more thing... I am now unable to finish up this book... I have just a few more pages left, but I have put it again aside for more than two weeks now... See, I know how it ends, and I don't want it to end.. I somehow want Anna to continue loving, to be that beautiful lady in that carriage on her way to the opera, to defy them all... I want this love story to be fixed, I want it to be patched up, have everybody happy, I want a Hollywood ending goddamit!

Yes, I know what you're thinking, I'm too sentimental... AND I'm wrongfully judging beautiful literature, ain't I?
Well, I will try to get myself together and accompany Anna all the way through.
I will miss carrying her around with me everywhere. My bag will be so much lighter now. And Champlain is no longer there to help me replace her with another beautiful love story published in French...