It’s the first day of 2024, but I still can’t forget how beautiful Anna Karenina is or how sad Goodbye to Berlin for me. Yep. Those are some of my 5 best reads for last year. Without further ado I want to talk about all of them here.
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina, oh how to describe this book? Perhaps, sublime would be the best description. I read the English translation version, translated by Kyrill Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes. I fall in love with the book from the first sentence, which we all remember:
“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Leo Tolstoy
Some readers out there said that Anna Karenina is just another lengthy drama with some wittiness and scandalous plot, and reading it feels like enjoying a soap opera. But for me, Anna Karenina is a tragic story everyone should read in understanding about a true happiness.
With its first sentence, Tolstoy subtly told his reader that true happiness is simple, it lies in each of our heart and it’s also our way to treat other people. That’s shown directly at the interaction between all the characters, specifically Anna Karenina herself as one of the main characters. She has everything in the world, and her world is perfect, but why was she still looking for happiness? Why she left Alexei Alexandrovich for Alexei Kirillych or Count Vronsky and then making both of them miserable?
As the story goes, readers understood why Anna felt in love with Vronsky. She was trapped in a loveless marriage when she met the young and handsome Vronsky. It was passionate and romantic, but then it led to jealousy, hatred, obsession, tragedy, and all of its consequences.
Contrast with her, there was also another girl, Yekaterina Alexandrovna Schcherbatsky or Kitty, who’s naively looking for happiness from the start. She was just a girl entering the upper aristocratic life of Moscow and starstruck to Vronsky, unaware that the charming man had lied his eyes for Anna only. Broken hearted, in the end Kitty found the truest happiness within her love to Konstantin Dmitrich or Levin and their simple life.
Levin is the next interesting character in Anna Karenina, socially awkward but kind-hearted living in his agricultural lifestyle. I don’t know why but I got the vague idea that Tolstoy tried to compared Anna’s life with Kitty, and Levin’s clumsiness yet simple life as landowner with Vronsky, a casanova with an extravagant life. He clearly told his readers that flamboyant life is nothing if unhappy heart living that life.
The readers perspective was also pushed to the extreme level when they realized that both Anna’s husband and lover name is Alexei. All characters are tangled with each other, but their relationships are easy to read. Yet, don’t ever think that the plot is dry and plain, because all of them makes you questioning everything: does Karenin had no sympathy? does Vronsky really loves Anna? does Anna really unhappy through all her life? does society treats her fairly?
The best thing about this novel, which released in 1878, is the plot still relevant to this day. We have infidelity, mental health, judging society, bigotry religion worshipper, and everything else. But what most relevant is, happiness and life co-exist to each other.
Telegram – Putu Wijaya
The next is from Indonesian Literature, Telegram by Putu Wijaya. This novel criticizes the life of all bastards in the world, and one of them is the main character. He was the guy who wants to be a hero while in reality, he was only a confused reporter with genital disease.
This novel was written with the Indonesian 70-80s time background, at that time, news couldn’t reached us as fast as now and the only tools to deliver urgent information was only with telegram.
The technology itself brought a huge trauma for the main character, because in his opinion telegram only delivered a devastating news which putting him in a hard position. The main character matches with Putu Wijaya’s background when he was still young, a Balinese guy worked in Jakarta being a journalist. He brought all his anger which originated from patriartical culture in Bali. He also have been arguing over and over again about Bali’s developing, which had made him in opposition position.
This book brings you the man’s dilemma in facing his traditional family and how he overcome all of his fears. Very recommended if you want to try to read Putu Wijaya first time.
Juan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo only needed to publish his two works for him to be known as one of the greatest Latin author in the world. With Pedro Paramo and El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo subtly told all of his reader about the strange life in Mexico.
Pedro Paramo focused on the man’s struggle to searched meaning of his life with searching his father. Along with his journey, he realized that his father, Pedro Paramo, was nothing but a dead man’s name in a town full of unfinished business and ghost. The eerie feeling came from spooky nuance this book had brought is brilliant, it leaves you wondering and asking the true meaning of love, life, and true happiness.
Mistery came with the name of Pedro Paramo, haunting every readers out there which struggle to undermine his own son’s fate on that strange town.
The next one is El Llano en llamas, or as the English reader call it The Plain in Flames. I read the Indonesian translation with the title Dataran Dalam Kobaran Api. This is a short collection of Juan Rulfo’s works, subtly telling everyone how miserable to live in the depth of Mexican villages with drought.
I have listed my three favorite short stories from this book, which are They Gave Us the Land (Mereka Telah Memberi Kami Lahan), We’re Very Poor (Karena Kami Sangat Miskin), and Anacleto Morales. All three of them were so sad but giving some humor about false use of religion as a way to gain influence in that poor society.
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin is a collection of some connected short stories about how Isherwood, once an outsider English teacher living in Berlin, became involved in several people who were threaten by the rise of the Nazis. His friendship began in some simple and subtle way, yet some ended in melancholic realization.
As time went away, the lives of people in Isherwood’s circle were getting robbed by the Nazis, as well as Berlin crashed from once a center of culture and fashion with its Golden Twenties into a depressing town doomed with its citizen only be able to acclimatizing themselves with the natural law.
"The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends -- my pupils at the Workers' School, the men and women I met at the I. A. H -- are in prison, possibly dead."
Interestingly, Isherwood describing his characters with queers way of thinking, making them interesting each of their own. He described two women, Sally Bowles and Natalia Landauer, with a great admiration and care, yet in an extreme subtleness, he told his readers that he had no sexual attraction towards them.
Initially, Isherwood came from British to Berlin to search freedom. It was ironically being asked by Herr Landauer with the discussion about Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde. For Isherwood, Berlin was land of freedom so even though he would be lonely, he chose to live there.
In his eyes, Berlin was perfect. They tolerate queer and glamorous lifestyle, they tolerate communist movement, and they tolerate Jewish business. The Nazis and Adolf Hitler changed them all. Isherwood even told about how this propaganda was being told to Berlin’s citizen, making Jews the wrong side in trade. The saddest part of all was how fast the society believed all those lies.
George Orwell was right, reading Goodbye to Berlin is like reading a brilliant sketches of a society in decay.
ARCTURIAN 
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