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Original Essays | October 18, 2009

From Leprosy to Lorca — Strange Inspiration

0 comments By Victoria Hislop

My first novel, The Island, was inspired by a chance visit to a tiny island leper colony off the coast of Greece on our summer holiday. It was a... Continue »

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1. 
   $10.49 Sale Trade Paper add to wish list

   The Return

   Victoria Hislop

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OneMansView, January 4, 2009

Anna K. loses her way (4.25*s)

This is a book about the subtle, yet unrelenting, pressures placed on those living in clearly distinguished ethnic communities to conform to basic ways of thinking and doing things, generally with few changes across generations. Nowhere is this pressure greater than on the selection of marital partners; delaying marriage or looking outside the community are not well received often with lasting consequences.

Anna, a Russian-Jewish immigrant in NYC, is thirty-something, unmarried, and not enamored of her community’s folkways and gauche materialism. A girl of striking beauty, she has always held herself apart with vague romantic ideas of finding a mate who will enable her to transcend her prosaic, ethnic life. However, worried about her advancing years, Anna settles on marrying Alex K, a well-to-do Jewish businessman twenty years older than her, and having a child. That could be the end of the story, but Anna’s dissatisfactions are only briefly delayed.

The author integrates other characters into Anna’s orbit: Katia, her younger first cousin, David, the non-Jewish professor boyfriend of Katia, and Lev, a younger man who is a pharmacist and a lover of foreign films. Their differing interactions with Anna more fully illustrate her discontent and increasingly extreme behavior as well as providing contrasting sensible alternatives for others struggling with belonging, identity, realities, etc.

Anna may not be the most sympathetic of characters given her self-centeredness, fantasies, and somewhat predatory behavior. Nonetheless, the book is a very well written and interesting account of people situated within a certain social context attempting to find happiness. The social milieu is certainly considered for its ability to be supportive or overly harsh in its judgments against deviations. Some finally adjust and conform, while others lose their way perhaps never to recover.

Having read Anna Karenina is completely unnecessary for appreciating this book. It stands on its own. The book does have its Russianisms – language, customs, etc, but not to the point of distraction.

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