The Audio Boot Club on Anna Karenina.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club,

which is also the Slate Daily podcast for Thursday, June 5th, 2008.

I'm June Thomas.

To introduce today's discussion, here's Stephen Metcalf.

Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. Today we're going to talk about Anna Kerenina, by some people's estimation, maybe the greatest novel ever written, by Leo Tolstoy.

Joining me today are Troy Patterson, Slate's television critic, and Katie Roefey, author of Uncommon Arrangements, which I'm told is out in paperback at this instant.

Troy, this is a massive book, how we're ever going to get our heads around it in a half an hour or so kind of beats me.

But why don't you start and give us some sense of what this book is about?

I'm going to ease my way into talking about the fact that this book is about life and death

and also marriage and adultery and, uh, spiritual longing, agriculture, tediously.

The central figures, well, let's start with a heroine and a coronina who begins the book as

the young and unhappily married wife of a St. Petersburg bureaucrat.

She's taken out of glance with Count Vronsky, a military man who had been attempting to woo Kitty, a tender young thing whose parents, the prince and princess, are ready to marry her off.

Before Kitty can be jilted by Voronsky, she herself has to refuse the proposal of Levin,

the character in the book, most like Tolstoy himself, sort of an acetic figure, a quester after spiritual truth and someone who

much prefers spending time in the country than to spending time in either Petersburg or Moscow.

Complications ensue.

Katie, do you want to take it up from there, maybe?

I mean, I think one thing that we're, one thing we're grappling with is that the book is so huge as to comprehend kind of all of life in some

overwhelming way. It's almost not like experiencing a work of art. It's not organized

according to any specifically strict or noticeable aesthetic principle. It just overwhelms you.

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