Another Lesson from Tolstoy
Tolstoy Lied. That is the name of a book a good friend lent to me: “You might be interested in this one,” she noted wryly. Despite its irksome title, Tolstoy Lied by Rachel Kadish is a lovely, witty, and insightful novel of manners. If, that is, manners are even possible within the cutthroat atmosphere of an English department in a major university. The narrator, Tracy Farber, is a professor of American lit and a great believer in the possibility of happiness. Hence, her disgruntlement with Tolstoy, who implied with his oh-so-famous first line from Anna Karenina,”happy families are all alike’ every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” that happy people are boring people, and that to be different, i.e. interesting, is to be unhappy. Tracy wants to be interesting and engaged with life, she wants happiness, love, and tenure at her university and she will not compromise her principles — or her devotion to truth — to get all that she wants. Unfortunately, the result may be that she does not get what she wants after all. Is happiness really so elusive?
I fell for this book from the page when Tracy described her love affair with books, describing the smell of them and something new, the sound of them: “turn their pages for enough hours and years and you start to rely on it, just as people who live by the shore assimilate the rhythm of the waves: the sweep and ripple making the end of a page, a sound that seems to be made by the turning of your thoughts rather than the movement of your hand.” No e-reader for Tracy: she loves the real thing, books with pages and histories, and even a few lessons or two. Happiness indeed.
And btw, Tolstoy did not lie.
