Her vivacity and humor are infectious: a reader often feels jostled. * Her novels share a mischievous joy in storytelling, world-building, and blending history and fiction into dreamlike landscapes. And falling short is a feat too, when it is falling short of the impossible.īoullosa is one of the leading Mexican voices in contemporary literature. The audacity of taking such a risk is perhaps all that matters.

It is a high-wire act for a novel to present not only Gorky and Tolstoy, but also their characters-one group taken directly from Anna Karenina, and another that seems to have stepped out of Gorky’s work. “Anna” in the title refers to Anna Karenina, so I thought of Tolstoy also, and he too makes an appearance, more demandingly, as he “barges” into two characters’ dreams. I thought of Gorky while reading Carmen Boullosa’s new novel, The Book of Anna, even before Gorky himself is briefly mentioned in it. In his fiction, characters are often given stage directions: “cried with jealousy in his voice,” “exclaimed admiringly,” or “laughed an indulgent laugh.” The three-volume Autobiography of Maxim Gorky, wonderfully populated with all kinds of characters, would have been more engaging if not for Gorky’s habitual emphasis on “this extraordinary Russian life,” “the misery and murky lives” of Russian people, or his own awakening: “My swelling heart almost split under pressure of many strange emotions, and I felt an encompassing, inarticulate love for all human beings and all the earth.” In another letter, Chekhov advised Gorky against his tendency to write like “a spectator in the theater who expresses his delight with so little restraint that he prevents himself and others from listening.” One wonders if Gorky ever heeded this advice. Tolstoy’s he praised you very highly and said that you were “a remarkable writer.” He likes your “The Fair” and “In the Steppe,” and does not like “Malva.” He said: “You can invent anything you like, but you can’t invent psychology, and in Gorky one comes across just psychological inventions: he describes what he has never felt.” In 1899 Anton Chekhov wrote to Maxim Gorky, an up-and-coming writer whose stories had caught his and Tolstoy’s attention:

For ios instal Anna Karenina