I am rereading ANNA KARININA for the third time, though the first in several decades. William Faulkner reportedly called it the greatest novel ever written. While I am skeptical about ‘greatests’—except where it is indisputable, such as the greatest small boat sailor who ever lived—but I digress—ANNA KARININA is an exceptionally fine novel and I prefer it to WAR AND PEACE.
This reading was caused by our watching the 2012 movie version last weekend. That movie is very well done, stylized, partly taking place inside a theater with scenes transitioning to the outside. One sequence vividly expresses unbridled sexual passion without ever revealing any significant body parts. Quite a feat.
Above is the cover of the translation I am currently reading. First published in the UK in 2000, it is the best I have come across, and I am enjoying the novel even more than before.
The cover notes that it was a choice of The Oprah Book Club. If she got some of her audience to read the book, she did something worthwhile. I can only aspire to do the same.
While ANNA KARININA is a good movie, we watched one even better over the weekend, LITTLE BIG MAN, in which Dustin Hoffman portrays Jack Crabb, who at age 121 recounts his life during what those of us who came from Europe call ‘the opening of the West’ and native Americans call a disaster, including being the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn.
The film is both humorous and tragic. I was surprised to see that it was first released in 1970. I saw it then. That was a long, long time ago. So long ago that Dustin Hoffman and I were both young.
BookBub offered the novel on which the film is based a while ago. I bought it, but have not yet read it. Maybe after I finished ANNA.
We watched ANNA KARININA on Netflix and LITTLE BIG MAN on Amazon Prime Video.
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An article in NEWSWEEK, which is one of the magazines I skim via the Texture app, states that five countries are responsible for 60% of all the plastic waste dumped in the oceans according to a study released by the Ocean Conservancy and that over half the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of fishing nets.
The five countries are China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. I am not aware that any of them plan to change their ways soon.
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I fly to GANNET two weeks from tomorrow.
The wind forecast is still good to sail to the Chesapeake.
According to the Living Earth app, there are presently six active tropical storms, Ernesto, Bebinca, Thirty—still only an unnamed depression, Lane, Soulik, and Rumbia. Only Ernesto is in the Atlantic and it is out in the middle and far north.
