Paris in the 1870s: Fertile Ground for Fiction

 Take a big book with you on vacation, and you won't have to worry about running out of reading material: that was what prompted me to cart along Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
when we went to Paris and Portugal a few weeks ago.  The fact that one of my library reading groups will discuss it in the spring was an added reason, as was the idea that really good books should be read at several points in one's life.  Since reading is a dynamic thing, what you as a reader bring to each reading can transform a book.  I fully expected to find completely different things in the novel than what I found the last time I read it maybe 20 years ago.

That was very true, in part at least.  The first half where we learn about the complicit seduction of Anna Karenina by Count Vronsky and the sorrows and joys of Levin and his Kitty as they try to live a good life came back to me in vivid detail.  But as the book advanced I realized 1) that I hadn't seen the political and theological argumentation that Tolstoy folded into his story and 2) that I hadn't finished the book...

Picking up the book after a long day of sight seeing in the City of Lights at first was a little disconcerting.  The Russian universe seemed at first so different from the vibrant city I was visiting.  But then I saw just how much Paris--transformed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the mid-19th century--resonated with Tolstoy's world.  The idle rich, the importance of railroads, the extravagant political ideas: they also were found in Haussmann's Paris, and, consequently, have echoes today.  (The photo is of construction of the Opéra Garnier which gives some idea of what went on as the city was completely reorganized.)

Then I began reflecting on other novels written in the same period. Afer Googling a bit I found that 1877 also saw the publication of two other very good ones that take place in Paris too: Emile Zola's L'Assommoir and Henry James's The American.  The pair are poles apart--Zola writes about those dispossessed by Haussmann's clearing of the center city and James's hero is a brash American industrialist who wants to marry the American widow of French aristocrat.  But they each give an engrossing picture of what the world was like then, and their observations complement Tolstoy's picture of Russian society.

Verdict: All three novels are worth reading again.  Think about taking one or all the next time you've got hours and hours of travel ahead of you.