All good things must come to an end. Trite, yes, but I really don’t feel like pontificating on this anymore, and that goes both for the book and my dietary curriculum. The long and the short of it is I’ve had diarrhea all day and I’m really not in the mood. So let’s get right down to it, shall we?

Pages 503 to 754: Kitty discovers that she is pregnant. Anna and Vronsky go to Italy. Vronsky tries to get into painting. He sucks at it. Alexey gets a girlfriend. After a long separation (and against the wishes of Alexey’s new fling), Anna makes a surprise visit to see her son. Apparently the new girl (a religious countess) told the kid his mom was dead. Oops.

Vronsky starts getting cold toward Anna: he’s getting tired of her shit. Meanwhile, Stepan and Dolly visit Levin and Kitty. Levin’s brother Sergey proposes to Kitty’s friend Verneka. Levin and Stepan go hunting with one of Stepan’s friends, Veslovsky. Veslovsky is a prick and Levin kicks him out of the house. Dolly visits Anna and Vronsky. Vronsky tells Dolly how badly he wants the divorce to be official so his daughter can have the same last name as him. Dolly goes to Anna and tries to convince her to continue divorce proceedings against Alexey. Anna whines about it. Anna does some opium. Vronsky returns from a trip. They argue. Anna finally tells him she’s sending the divorce papers to Alexey. About motherfucking time.

Kitty is about to have her baby. Levin and Sergey participate in local elections. Vronsky shows up and he and Levin bury the hatchet (Levin’s hated him since the beginning because he was Kitty’s first love). Levin and Stepan see Anna again. Anna does more opium. Levin goes home and Kitty goes into labor.

Kitty and Levin’s baby is born. It’s a boy. Stepan, who is now broke, begs Alexey to give Anna the divorce. Alexey’s nut job girlfriend talks him into using a spiritual medium to determine the best outcome. Stepan gets the answer the next day: Alexey won’t grant Anna the divorce. Obsessing over his recent frigidity, Anna starts believing that Vronsky is having an affair. Anna does serious amounts of opium. She starts seriously loosing her shit.

Anna wants to leave town while they wait for the divorce proceedings to go through. Vronsky tells her they can go to the country in a few days after he clears up some loose ends (Stepan still hasn’t told them Alexey’s decision). Anna wants to leave now: she starts saying rude shit to Vronsky, including dissing his mom. He gets pissed and leaves the house. Anna tries to send him a note but he misses it. She whines some more. She leaves the house and goes to the train station. Not one to skimp on the dramatic, she throws herself into the way of an oncoming train.

Alexey raises Anna and Vronsky’s daughter. Stepan gets a good job. Sergey publishes a book. Vronsky leaves Moscow to fight the Turks. Levin finds God. Done. Finished. The End.

I go to a nearby Chinese restaurant and order courageous portions of food. It’s good but I only chose the place because they have one of the best bathrooms in town: a dark, blood red chamber of black marble and neon lighting behind thick panes of frosted glass. Seriously, I feel like Don Johnson when I’m in there. It’s an amenity with a high priority today: In the last 24 hours I estimate I’ve gotten at least 60 pages of Anna Karenina knocked out from the toilet.

The book was good. Levin’s continual jealousy of Vronsky throughout the book is funny, given it ends with Levin’s rebirth into politics, the birth of his son, his new belief in God. While Levin and Vronsky are pitted as polar opposites, the real meat of the story lies somewhere in the dynamic between Levin and Anna. There’s a theme in how our motivations can be separate from our core beliefs, in how we need to pull away from social convention if we desire truth. Realizing that she’ll always be nothing more than a mistress, Anna’s finds herself rendered obsolete in modern society. Her search for truth is essentially tied to her use in society. Cry me a river. Levin, by contrast, never fit in. His stoicism, his refusal to let anything go, is pitted against Anna’s presumed transcendence. Levin’s suspicion of religion is a nice touch: throughout most of the book religion is seen as a trifling annoyance, one of the inevitable trappings of what comes with being rich in nineteenth century Russia. Christianity is something communities “just do.” In the end, Levin finds truth on his own. In a way, so does Vronsky: as much of a haughty dickhole as he was, I can’t blame him for one second for wanting to leave Anna. For real, that bitch was played.

The End