When Anna asks if Emma would like to read her story, Emma responds, “I don’t think so. Via dialogue and flashes of subtle stagecraft, Anna and Emma come brilliantly right to life. How deftly Pauline Melville summons these characters. Take, for example, Emma’s response to Anna on the effect her children had on fresh infatuation: “Did you find that once you had fallen for someone else you suddenly couldn’t stand your child? I remember shoving my daughter away and thinking she was an ugly little so and so.” The dialogue shimmers and crackles with psychological insight and wit. What follows is something of a Beckettian pastiche as the two women discuss their lives and follies and their shared ultimate fate. It opens with a delightful, panning view of a forgotten Invisible City: “It is only when you enter the missing city that you understand it consists of nothing but linked waiting-rooms.” The reader is then ushered into one such room of waiting whereupon they discover who else but Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Pauline Melville’s “Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides” perfectly illustrates the fun and pleasure to be found in the human drama that rustles at the edge of some of our most famous stories. I guess it makes sense that I’d end up editing short stories, which as a form, tends to favor the moment at which the ordinary swells with meaning and thereby illuminates some key shift in a life. There’s a kind of silly perversity to it, a child investing his imagination in dreaming up daily routines as opposed to the heart-stopping thrill ride. What were their favorite foods and hobbies? Where did they go when they didn’t have to save the world or go on big adventures? I was more drawn to the lulls between big moments and the quiet drone of dailiness. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their SuicidesĪs a child, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the characters in my favorite books and cartoons were up to when they were offstage.
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