The Book of Anna

January 13, 2020
Boullosa (Before) imagines the legacy of Tolstoy’s character Anna Karenina in revolutionary St. Petersburg in this inspired if slight tale. In 1905, Anna’s son, Sergei, now an adult, is still haunted by the scandal his mother caused when she left her husband, his father, to run off with Vronsky. When the czar requisitions a portrait of Anna for the royal collection, Sergei can’t bear the thought of exhibiting his mother’s portrait to a society that loves to gossip about her, and is repulsed by his half-sister, Anya, the daughter of Anna and Vronsky, for being the “spitting image” of his shameful mother. Meanwhile, rebel priest Father Gapon organizes a movement of the poor and disenfranchised, and a group of anarchists, including the fiery seamstress Clementine, who wears one of Anna’s dresses out of apparent solidarity with the transgressive figure, plot to bomb the czar’s car. In short, pointed chapters, Boullosa draws on St. Petersburg’s revolutionary fervor, making an implicit analogy between historical social movements and Anna’s personal attempt at liberation with a long, revisionist fairy tale purportedly written by Anna before her death. Despite the novel’s undeniable thrills, the characters do not progress beyond their roles as representations. Boullosa’s speculative rumination falls short.

February 15, 2020
A madcap romp through St. Petersburg jumbles fiction together with history, anarchists with royalists, sense with nonsense. Sergei Karenin is driven to distraction by two things: First, that when people see him they think only of his mother and the scandal she created in St. Petersburg society; and, second, that like his mother, but unlike most of the others around him, he is a fictional character. At the opera, he wonders, "Is there anyone here who sees me not as a character, but as a person?" He despairs: "Even I think of myself as a character." The latest novel from one of Mexico's finest experimental writers is a madcap metafictive romp that picks up a few decades after Tolstoy's Anna Karenina leaves off. But it's also an absurdist tour de force account of early revolutionary activity. The book opens in 1905. An anarchist seamstress leaves a bomb on a train but it fails to blow up. A mysterious priest named Father Gapon is leading a march to the czar, "seeking justice and protection." "Comrades," Gapon asks the masses, "do you swear to die for our cause?" "We swear!" they respond. Meanwhile, Sergei's wife finds a box in the attic: It seems that Anna Karenina has left behind not one but two manuscripts written in an opium-fueled state. The second of these, a fairy tale about a girl named Anna, drives the latter half of Boullosa's book. What does this all add up to? Who could say? The czar is taking a bubble bath, but the masses are on the march. All roads seem to point toward revolution. Reminiscent of Bolaño, Borges, and Pynchon, but Boullosa's utterly original voice is at its best when it's let loose.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2020
Prominent Mexican writer Boullosa (When Mexico Recaptures Texas, 2015) presents an imaginative postscript to Anna Karenina which reanimates Tolstoy's characters to explore questions of legacy and liberation. Anna's son, Sergei, now a timid middle-aged man, must decide whether to yield Mikhailov's painting of his mother to the tsar as requested. Sergei's sister, Anya, has grown into a lively but complicated young woman, aware of how far from her mother's mind she was when Anna threw herself on the tracks. Meanwhile, Anya's servant, Aleksandra, has gotten mixed up with some revolutionaries, including Clementine the anarchist and other devotees of the insurrectionist priest Gapon. Plots, protests, and bloody reprisals abound, but the book's climax somehow dwells on Anna's manuscript, which relates a curious opium-laced fairy tale of feminine empowerment. Boullosa adds to the chaos with metafictional embellishments, including constant reminders of her characters' fictitiousness, commentary on the impact Tolstoy's novel has had on their lives, and a dream-sequence interaction with Tolstoy himself. It's a noisy narrative, to be sure, as this book's female protagonists joyfully emancipate themselves from the strictures of the nineteenth-century novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)