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    What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel
    What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel
    What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel

    Written by Irina Reyn

    Narrated by Karen White

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Vivacious thirty-seven-year-old Anna K. is comfortably married to Alex, an older, prominent businessman from her tight-knit Russian-Jewish immigrant community in Queens. But a longing for freedom is reignited in this bookish, overly romantic, and imperious woman when she meets her cousin Katia Zavurov's boyfriend, an outsider and aspiring young writer on whom she pins her hopes for escape. As they begin a reckless affair, Anna enters into a tailspin that alienates her from her husband, family, and entire world.

    In nearby Rego Park's Bukharian-Jewish community, twenty-seven-year-old pharmacist Lev Gavrilov harbors two secret passions: French movies and the lovely Katia. Lev's restless longing to test the boundaries of his sheltered life powerfully collides with Anna's. But will Lev's quest result in life's affirmation rather than its destruction?

    Exploring struggles of identity, fidelity, and community, What Happened to Anna K. is a remarkable retelling of the Anna Karenina story brought vividly to life by an exciting young writer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 8, 2008
    ISBN9781400178247
    Author

    Irina Reyn

    Irina Reyn is the author of What Happened to Anna K and The Imperial Wife. She is also the editor of the anthology Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State. She has reviewed books for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Forward, and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in One Story, Tin House, Ploughshares, Town & Country Travel and Poets & Writers. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, NY.

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    Reviews for What Happened to Anna K.

    3.5/5

    93 ratings14 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The thing about a reworking of a classic is that you pretty much know where it's going before you begin reading. You know who is going to fall in love and who is going to die, so any surprises rely upon the author's ability to find some new way of looking at things, a new twist, a way of interpreting the story to reflect the lives of readers. So the very existence of a reworking of a well-loved novel begs one question: Why should I bother?In the case of "What Happened to Anna K." I'm a bit hard pressed to answer that question. It's not badly written by any means, and the contemporary setting in the community of Russian Jewish emigres is interesting enough to propel this reader through a fair number of pages. But in the end, it would need to be the characters who hold our attention. And there Reyn falls down on the job, in my opinion, creating an Anna K. so removed from her own life that I was left wondering how she was capable of either enough joy or sorrow to inform her choices. In fact, Reyn's writing has virtually removed Anna from the narrative, too. Again, it's not badly written, but rather written as if from a distance.I was reminded, as I read, of "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen." Anna's desire for an intellectual life echoes that of "Memoirs..." Sasha, but she lacks Sasha's appeal, and most particularly, her humor. In fact, Anna's desire seems to be more focused the trappings of an intellectual life; seeing the right films, discussing them in the right coffee houses with earnest young men who will later make love to her in a way that will make her feel like the heroine of a Truffaut film. Her desires always seem to rely upon what her men can do for her, how they make her feel. There's a vast emptiness in Anna which makes her very hard to like, much less identify with.In the end, it wasn't a bad read. It did engage me occasionally, particularly when Reyn was telling the story of Katia. But on the whole, it is a book that doesn't succeed in ringing any important changes on the story of Anna Karenina.
    • 2/5
      Modern day version of Anna Karenina but I found it more sad and tragic in the modern day world. Subjects focus on dreams, not reality.
    • 1/5
      I looked forward to reading this and am sad that I didn't like it. Didn't like Anna at all. I thought the author describing her boobs (and the words used) not once but twice in the few pages I read was really weird.
    • 3/5
      The writing this book was just ok. I did like that we were not bombarded with more detail than we needed, but none of the characters was that interesting. I enjoyed learning about the Bukharian community.
    • 3/5
      I'm ambivalent about this book. It was a really interesting story about the culture of Russian immigrants and Jews. There was really only one person that I could say wasn't deeply flawed. The book was a well-written study of human character and relationships.
    • 4/5
      I think this book would have been a lot more meaningful if I'd actually read Anna Karenina already. But as it was, it was a very interesting story, well written and entertaining. And it made me want to read the original even more than I wanted to before!
    • 4/5
      Reyn has chosen to taken the essence of Anna Karenina, using the New York City Russian-Jewish community for the setting and characters. 21st century people aren’t any more enthralled with a wife’s infidelity than they were in 18th century Russia. Beyond the story plot which you can read in many places, I was entranced with the variety of characters as well as what appear to be the insular communities of the Jewish immigrants. I’m glad I read this debut novel. Reyn was able to take me into a segment of American live of which I knew nothing.
    • 3/5
      Interesting modern adaptation of Tolstoy's classic. The Russian soul behind the story tends to get a bit overly dramatic and self-conscious at times, but that probably goes with the territory.
    • 3/5
      What happened to Anna K.? By Irina Reyn The story revolves around a community of Russian and Bukharian Jews living in the different boroughs of New York. They generally live, work and marry within their community to retain as much of their cultural traditions as possible. Anna K. is described in detail as a beautiful, artistic soul that struggles to find an ideal place in the world. She craves love, romance of an old fashioned kind and to inspire a writer to fulfill greatness. Katia, another main character is Anna's beautiful, younger cousin, also searching for love, marriage, family etc. Anna is tormented by what she believes her destiny must be and Katia, who has always idolized Anna is devastated when Anna begins a sordid relationship with her ex love. The book is interesting from a cultural viewpoint, their lives are somewhat mysterious to the typical American. The reader wants to care about Anna but her selfishness, conceit and neediness keep us from ever truly rooting for her. Katia is much more likable and the men in the story are also quite interesting to follow. Definitely different and a worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      If you've read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, you know very well what happend to Anna K. That, however, didn't detract from this beautifully written novel one bit.Anna K. marries an older man early in this novel. After becoming a mother, she falls deeply in love with her counsin's boyfriend. She then makes a series of choices that ultimately lead to her downfall.Irina Reyn has set this story, which shares the basic plot of Anna Karenina, in modern day New York City. The story unfolds in a close-knit community of Russian immigrants. In this way, the author captures not only a classic story of depression and self-destruction, but a very contempory story of maintaining one's culture surrounded by all the social and material trappings of the "American dream". The main characters in Ms. Reyn's novel are shown in fine detail, and even the glimpses provided into the lives and hearts of secondary characters are finely drawn to create a well-rounded picture of life in this immigrant community. Even had Anna Karenina never been written, this novel would stand as a compelling story.
    • 4/5
      Modern day Anna Karenina? Quite a daring idea, to say the least. In "Acknowledgments", the author writes that her novel "would doubtlessly appall" Lev Tolstoy, and I admire her humility in saying that. To me, though, it seemed that Ms.Reyn used Anna's story just as a skeleton of sorts to build around - to tell the story of recent Russian Jewish immigrants in New York, which she did with perfection, a sharp eye for detail and for nuances of their transition. As for Anna's tragedy, it did make me want to re-read Tolstoy, rather urgently, and see how much of Anna's soul is in this book. Self-absorption leads to self-destruction...
    • 4/5
      I have never read "Anna Karenina" so I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading "What Happened to Anna K" which was billed as a reinterpretation of this Tolstoy classic. But in the end I don't think it mattered that I had not read the original--this book was mesmerizing. I couldn't put it down, and at the end of this tragic story I was left contemplating larger issues of female happiness and depression driven by society's demands. "What Happened" tells the story of Anna K. a Russian Immigrant in her late-30s who is unmarried at the beginning of the novel. Anna marries, then falls in love with another man, then makes a series of choices that tear her life apart. It is heartbreaking to read of these choices Anna makes, but it is also easy to identify with the feelings that drive her in the reckless directions dictated by her feelings. Although the novel focuses specifically on the Russian immigrant experience in Rego Park, Queens, I think the story has broader appeal to all women. Anna's end is tragic--I should have expected it after reading a synopsis of "Anna Karenina" online--but the novel keeps you reading right to the end. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reinterpretations of classic literature. This book is full of illusions to other works and is overall very literary. I thought it was a powerful work--well worth a late summer read.
    • 5/5
      Impressive debut novel! Taking inspiration from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Irina Reyn brings Anna's character into the 21st century. In Reyn's imagination, Anna is a Russian-Jewish immigrant living in New York. In a comfortable marriage to an older man, Anna feels restless and unfulfilled, and begins a reckless affair with her cousin Katya's boyfriend.I loved absolutely everything about this novel - from the mesmerizing descriptions, to novel's tragic sense of humor and the hopeless characters. Being a Russian immigrant myself, and having dated Bukharian men, I constantly found myself thinking, "Yes! This is exactly how things work!" while reading the book. Reyn's chapter on the "Great Russian Soul" was priceless; her take on the Jewish-Russian immigrants in NYC and the Bukharian community was dead-on.This is not a happy-ending novel; the characters can be thought of as hopeless, self-centered, and to have no redeeming qualities. However, that was part of the novel's appeal. I've found that there are few books that stay away from the cliche everything-works-out endings, and Reyn was definitely not afraid to take that chance. A stellar debut on all counts!
    • 4/5
      An updated version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina based in current times. I actually didn't know this but kept drawing parallels with Tolstoy's book all through the reading. However, it was not obviously, definitely apparent until the last page or so (unless, of course, you've read Tolstoy's version recently and remember all the characters' names!)