Anna Karenina
Nabokov called it "flawless." A novel of such moral complexity and psychological realism that every major character feels inevitable and tragic. Tolstoy builds a whole world, then shows it grinding people down. The 2007 TIME poll of 125 authors placed it at number one.
"This went on for like 200 pages," one reader says of the jealousy spiral, the same accusation cycling to the horizon. The farming and land-reform chapters fare worse, a love story "buried under pages of unreadable and irrelevant prattle," and the whole undertaking runs long enough that finishing reads as endurance: "reading this 800+ page tome has been an odyssey." Every character answers to four names depending on the speaker; keep a list or drown. "I wanted to stab myself every time Anna showed up," confesses one reader who came for the romance and left exhausted by it. And the ledger never balances: Stiva philanders for free while Anna pays full price for one affair, an unfairness the book seems closer to blessing than examining.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
