Overview

In this continuation of Anna Karenina's legacy, Russa simmers on the brink of change and the stories long kept secret finally come to light. Saint Petersburg, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the vivid portrait that the tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts Anna wrote just before her death, which open a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairy tale.  Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapon, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, plan protests that embroil the downstairs members of the Karenin household in their plots and tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa tells a polyphonic and subversive tale of the Russian revolution through the lens of Tolstoy's most beloved work.

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9781566895774

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Reviews

Anna Karenina's children and other fictions of Tolstoy's-who know they aren't exactly human-intertwine with Carmen Boullosa's own fictions, who think they are real, and also with the Russian Revolution. A delightfully original and enjoyable book-Russian literature seen through Latin American eyes, and made into something new. -Salman Rusdie What does it mean to say that a fictional character has so infused our collective imagination that she's 'taken on a life of her own'? And what if the very vitality of her fictional portrait is what seems to deny her the possibility of living that life-or telling it as her own story? Carmen Boullosa plants an anarcho-feminist bomb in the afterlife of Tolstoy's novel-and then lovingly collects the scattered pages and bloodied rags that she's let fly, assembling them into a dreamscape where author, character and reader might finally be pressed to recognize one another's autonomous voice, and humanity. Historical and yet uncannily actual, readerly and yet deeply writerly, The Book of Anna is a much-needed reminder of the performative power of fiction in unjust and turbulent times. -Barbara Browning A beguiling return to the world created by Tolstoy. This beautiful translation takes Anna Karenina's story a step further, showing how a single tragedy ripples across generations. -Elliot Ackerman, author of Waiting for Eden Praise for Carmen Boullosa For sheer inventiveness and mischievous brio, few contemporary novelists can match Carmen Boullosa. In this, one of her best novels, a nineteenth-century Russian masterpiece is both updated and turned on its head. Comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy, are all blended flawlessly. The result is a delicious, spicy literary gazpacho or should I say borscht. -Phillip Lopate Carmen Boullosa writes with a heart-stopping command of language. -Alma Guillermoprieto A cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and W. G. Sebald. -El Pais This book occupies a Borgesian tradition in which possible and impossible exist simultaneously in one text. -John Trefry, Full Stop [Boullosa] is witty, wacky, iconoclastic, post-modern, and thoroughly original. -The Modern Novel Read Boullosa because she is a masterful commander of fantastic language. -Words Without Borders Mexico's greatest woman writer. -Roberto Bolano A luminous writer . . . Boullosa is a masterful spinner of the fantastic. -Miami Herald Utterly entertaining-a comic tour de force. I loved the book and think it deserves a very wide readership. -Philip Lopate Brutal, poetic, hilarious and humane...a masterly crafted tale. -Sjon A lucid translation from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee. . . . [Boullosa's] tale, loosely based on the Mexican invasion of the US known as the 'Cortina troubles', evok[es] a history that couldn't be more relevant to today's immigration battles in the US. -Jane Ciabattari, BBC

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. . . . Reminiscent of Bolano, Borges, and Pynchon, but Boullosa's utterly original voice is at its best when it's let loose. -Kirkus Anna Karenina's children and other fictions of Tolstoy's-who know they aren't exactly human-intertwine with Carmen Boullosa's own fictions, who think they are real, and also with the Russian Revolution. A delightfully original and enjoyable book-Russian literature seen through Latin American eyes, and made into something new. -Salman Rusdie What does it mean to say that a fictional character has so infused our collective imagination that she's 'taken on a life of her own'? And what if the very vitality of her fictional portrait is what seems to deny her the possibility of living that life-or telling it as her own story? Carmen Boullosa plants an anarcho-feminist bomb in the afterlife of Tolstoy's novel-and then lovingly collects the scattered pages and bloodied rags that she's let fly, assembling them into a dreamscape where author, character and reader might finally be pressed to recognize one another's autonomous voice, and humanity. Historical and yet uncannily actual, readerly and yet deeply writerly, The Book of Anna is a much-needed reminder of the performative power of fiction in unjust and turbulent times. -Barbara Browning A beguiling return to the world created by Tolstoy. This beautiful translation takes Anna Karenina's story a step further, showing how a single tragedy ripples across generations. -Elliot Ackerman, author of Waiting for Eden Praise for Carmen Boullosa For sheer inventiveness and mischievous brio, few contemporary novelists can match Carmen Boullosa. In this, one of her best novels, a nineteenth-century Russian masterpiece is both updated and turned on its head. Comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy, are all blended flawlessly. The result is a delicious, spicy literary borscht. -Phillip Lopate Carmen Boullosa writes with a heart-stopping command of language. -Alma Guillermoprieto A cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and W. G. Sebald. -El Pais This book occupies a Borgesian tradition in which possible and impossible exist simultaneously in one text. -John Trefry, Full Stop [Boullosa] is witty, wacky, iconoclastic, post-modern, and thoroughly original. -The Modern Novel Read Boullosa because she is a masterful commander of fantastic language. -Words Without Borders Mexico's greatest woman writer. -Roberto Bolano A luminous writer . . . Boullosa is a masterful spinner of the fantastic. -Miami Herald Utterly entertaining-a comic tour de force. I loved the book and think it deserves a very wide readership. -Philip Lopate Brutal, poetic, hilarious and humane...a masterly crafted tale. -Sjon A lucid translation from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee. . . . [Boullosa's] tale, loosely based on the Mexican invasion of the US known as the 'Cortina troubles', evok[es] a history that couldn't be more relevant to today's immigration battles in the US. -Jane Ciabattari, BBC

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. . . . Reminiscent of Bolano, Borges, and Pynchon, but Boullosa's utterly original voice is at its best when it's let loose. -Kirkus This superb translation from Spanish by Samantha Schnee, founding editor of Words Without Borders, is a book of nimble prose that deftly plays with the boundaries between fiction and history. Drawing together servants, diplomats, anarchists, seamstresses and aristocrats at the eve of the Russian Revolution, Boullosa brings heightened eroticism, feminism, and liberation to Tolstoy's imagined world. -The Observer Anna Karenina's children and other fictions of Tolstoy's-who know they aren't exactly human-intertwine with Carmen Boullosa's own fictions, who think they are real, and also with the Russian Revolution. A delightfully original and enjoyable book-Russian literature seen through Latin American eyes, and made into something new. -Salman Rusdie What does it mean to say that a fictional character has so infused our collective imagination that she's 'taken on a life of her own'? And what if the very vitality of her fictional portrait is what seems to deny her the possibility of living that life-or telling it as her own story? Carmen Boullosa plants an anarcho-feminist bomb in the afterlife of Tolstoy's novel-and then lovingly collects the scattered pages and bloodied rags that she's let fly, assembling them into a dreamscape where author, character and reader might finally be pressed to recognize one another's autonomous voice, and humanity. Historical and yet uncannily actual, readerly and yet deeply writerly, The Book of Anna is a much-needed reminder of the performative power of fiction in unjust and turbulent times. -Barbara Browning A beguiling return to the world created by Tolstoy. This beautiful translation takes Anna Karenina's story a step further, showing how a single tragedy ripples across generations. -Elliot Ackerman, author of Waiting for Eden Praise for Carmen Boullosa For sheer inventiveness and mischievous brio, few contemporary novelists can match Carmen Boullosa. In this, one of her best novels, a nineteenth-century Russian masterpiece is both updated and turned on its head. Comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy, are all blended flawlessly. The result is a delicious, spicy literary borscht. -Phillip Lopate Carmen Boullosa writes with a heart-stopping command of language. -Alma Guillermoprieto A cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and W. G. Sebald. -El Pais This book occupies a Borgesian tradition in which possible and impossible exist simultaneously in one text. -John Trefry, Full Stop [Boullosa] is witty, wacky, iconoclastic, post-modern, and thoroughly original. -The Modern Novel Read Boullosa because she is a masterful commander of fantastic language. -Words Without Borders Mexico's greatest woman writer. -Roberto Bolano A luminous writer . . . Boullosa is a masterful spinner of the fantastic. -Miami Herald Utterly entertaining-a comic tour de force. I loved the book and think it deserves a very wide readership. -Philip Lopate Brutal, poetic, hilarious and humane...a masterly crafted tale. -Sjon A lucid translation from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee. . . . [Boullosa's] tale, loosely based on the Mexican invasion of the US known as the 'Cortina troubles', evok[es] a history that couldn't be more relevant to today's immigration battles in the US. -Jane Ciabattari, BBC

What does it mean to say that a fictional character has so infused our collective imagination that she's 'taken on a life of her own'? And what if the very vitality of her fictional portrait is what seems to deny her the possibility of living that life-or telling it as her own story? Carmen Boullosa plants an anarcho-feminist bomb in the afterlife of Tolstoy's novel-and then lovingly collects the scattered pages and bloodied rags that she's let fly, assembling them into a dreamscape where author, character and reader might finally be pressed to recognize one another's autonomous voice, and humanity. Historical and yet uncannily actual, readerly and yet deeply writerly, The Book of Anna is a much-needed reminder of the performative power of fiction in unjust and turbulent times. -Barbara Browning A beguiling return to the world created by Tolstoy. This beautiful translation takes Anna Karenina's story a step further, showing how a single tragedy ripples across generations. -Elliot Ackerman, author of Waiting for Eden Praise for Carmen Boullosa Carmen Boullosa writes with a heart-stopping command of language. -Alma Guillermoprieto A cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and W. G. Sebald. -El Pais This book occupies a Borgesian tradition in which possible and impossible exist simultaneously in one text. -John Trefry, Full Stop [Boullosa] is witty, wacky, iconoclastic, post-modern, and thoroughly original. -The Modern Novel Read Boullosa because she is a masterful commander of fantastic language. -Words Without Borders Mexico's greatest woman writer. -Roberto Bolano A luminous writer . . . Boullosa is a masterful spinner of the fantastic. -Miami Herald Utterly entertaining-a comic tour de force. I loved the book and think it deserves a very wide readership. -Philip Lopate Brutal, poetic, hilarious and humane...a masterly crafted tale. -Sjon A lucid translation from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee. . . . [Boullosa's] tale, loosely based on the Mexican invasion of the US known as the 'Cortina troubles', evok[es] a history that couldn't be more relevant to today's immigration battles in the US. -Jane Ciabattari, BBC

Author Information

Carmen Boullosa-a Cullman Center, a Guggenheim, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and a Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes Fellow-was born in Mexico City in 1954. She's a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, and artist, and has been a professor at New York University, Columbia University, City College-City University of New York, Georgetown, and other institutions. She's now at Macaulay Honors College-City University of New York. The New York Public Library acquired her papers and artist books. More than a dozen books and over ninety dissertations have been written about her work. El complot de los Romnticos.

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