As promised in post #1, this series is going to look at some of my personal favourites among book openings, starting with the classics.

And it’s hard to get more classic than Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Immediately upon reading this, I wanted to know more of the unhappy family — the Oblonskys. In other words, as a hook, it was extremely successful.

(I believe many others have found the same, i.e. I am not alone in my admiration and appreciation. :D)

Also, although Anna Karenina is a substantial novel (though nowhere near so substantial as War and Peace) I feel that the opening line really frames the story. This is a book about family’s and their dynamics, many unhappy, but with some achieving a perilous equilibrium, if not peace, and a fragile happiness.

It’s also a story about the factors that create happiness and unhappiness in relationships and marriage.

But hold on, you may cry, isn’t Anna Karenina about an affair, vengeance, and how that all turns out? Answer: yes, it is, but there’s so much more woven about that, including how the affair affects the families and friendships of the protagonists, Anna and Vronsky.

Arguably, too, Kitty and Levin* (*who I always suspect may be a Tolstoy analog, if not an outright ‘Mary Sue’ in modern parlance) are just as central to the story as Anna and Vronsky.

The magic and power, to my mind, is that the opening is a key which unlocks the rest of the book.

~*~

My edition is the 1977 hardback published by Heineman, translated in 1901 by Constance Garnett. It looks like this, and has an honoured place on my bookshelf: