Anna Karenina: the joy of long books

In a possibly ill-advised move, I decided yesterday that I wanted to read Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina before the new film adaptation (starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law; trailer below).  Armed with a disgracefully cheap Wordsworth Classics copy, I quickly got to work on its 806 pages.  Unfortunately, it quickly emerged that (presumably to cut costs) the publisher had used the smallest font possible.  The nine days until the film release suddenly don't seem so long.

Now, I'm no stranger to long books.  With an English degree behind me I've tucked away 20 Victorian novels in a term, as well as chewing through James Joyce's Ulysses and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (the longest poem in English, I believe).  I only drew the line at Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, which comes in at a smidgeon under a million words - in my defence I had to write about the almost-as-long Tom Jones and the not insubstantial Pamela in the same week, and I ended up writing an essay on why Clarissa's length made it impossible to study.  But I digress.  (Much like Tolstoy.)

The Road to successful film adaptation...

(by Claire Davis)

One of the best books I have read all year has got to be The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Stunningly written, heart-wrenchingly sad and one of the most unsettling stories I have read in my entire lifetime, its poetic language and beautifully bleak imagery left me with a very real terror at the possibilities of humanity, when the world as we know it comes to an end.

Which of course meant that the film The Road, directed by John Hillcoat, couldn't possibly match up to my expectations. Well, readers, I was actually surprised, and found myself to be wrong as I sat captivated in front of the movie version of the book last night. It was an extremely uncanny experience; as though somebody had climbed into my very own head, extracted the scenes from my imagination as I turned the pages of that book, and played them out on the big screen for me to watch. It could have been a projection of my very own perceptions. Powerful, upsetting, frightening and hauntingly (yet so paradoxically) beautiful, I was wholeheartedly impressed by the film.