Short Cuts

Last summer, searching for a way to wile away the hours after failing to line up a summer job, I turned to the “Serious Books” shelf of my bookcase. Stocked with classics like “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Moby Dick,” it’s the place where I put all of the thick, intimidating (mostly Russian) novels relatives have given me.

I started on “Anna Karenina” out of pure boredom. My copy of the 900-page Tolstoy epic, a remnant of my mother’s college days, had crinkled yellowed pages and minuscule font. I fully expected to abandon it after a few pages. But I was drawn in by the lush portrayal of 19th-century aristocracy, the disturbed internal monologues of the protagonists, and the philosophical reflections on farming. For me, Anna’s romantic set-up was merely the framework upon which a richer novel could unfold.

Without the anomaly of an unscheduled summer, I would never have been able to read the novel. The British company Orion Books claims to have found a solution for busy people like myself. This spring, it began to publish ultra-abridged versions of classics like “Anna Karenina,” shortening them to about half their original size and advertising them as great books “in half the time.” The goal is to trim away all excess verbiage, jettison any pointless asides, and streamline prose so that it follows a more straightforward narrative. With a few judicious strikeouts, Thackeray can become Hemingway.

The London Times satirized the collection by performing its own cuts. Of “Anna Karenina”: “The problem is, thought Anna—her aristocratic brow furrowing slightly under a fabulous new hat—men look so irresistible in uniform! Ditto boots, billowing shirts and moustaches! Hang marriage. Hang motherhood. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a train to catch.”
An entire classic in only 42 words! But why stop there? One could follow in the path of Foxtrot’s Peter, who uses the “Cliff’s CliffsNotes” for Hamlet. They read simply: “Danish prince dies.”

There’s an element of the ludicrous in all this. In hacking away all narrative musings not directly pertinent to a novel’s plot, Orion and other abridgers strip novels of their essence. A classic does not become a classic just because it has an interesting story line, or else Stephen King would be on the AP English syllabus. Rather, a work is considered “good” because it points to something deeper, in society or in ourselves, beyond the realm of ordinary human experience. Tolstoy’s genius was to take something as banal as Anna’s infidelity and give it a darker psychological twist.

But Orion’s product and the way in which it is marketed point to a larger issue. With the fervor of anthropologists discovering a new culture, journalists have recently been calling attention to the consumption habits of modern consumers, Man 2.0. These are the people who want to read but don’t have time to, the kind who rush from business meeting to dinner table while frantically typing the next day’s schedule into their PDAs. They’re the ones who read CliffsNotes in high school and read abridged books now, the ones who are propelling Pierre Bayard’s “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” to the top of the bestseller lists.

It may be tempting to turn to plot summaries and compact editions of novels in order to be able to spit out impressive information at cocktail parties down the line. Of course people are free to buy abridged books for their own personal pleasure. But when they finish, they should make no pretense to having understood the author’s literary intentions.

Besides, if knowing what happens in a book were the only point of fiction, the genre would have died long ago. After all, the facts in an imaginary world aren’t that important. The beauty of reading the classics is that one can enter into an intimate conversation with the author and lose oneself in an alien world—a world as strange, complex, and unable to be condensed as our own.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Canaday Hall.