London in the bitterly cold post-war winter of 1947. Albert & Albertine Whitelaw are a recently married couple. Albert was an officer in the British Army during the War, and Albertine a Jewish woman who had to leave France under the existential Nazi threat. They met in a hospital Alexandria in Egypt where Albert was recovering from being wounded and to where Albertine had fled via a peripatetic route to evade the German menace. The story is narrated by Albertine in the first person – with no living relatives, she is trying to adapt to her new life in an austere war-ravaged London. Albert works for the government in post-war diplomatic reconstruction, and Albertine, looking for a role, finds work as a companion to an ageing member of the Russian nobility – Sergei Carr, or Karenin. The name may be familiar to the reader, and indeed, it turns out that Sergei Carr (or Ka) is the son of Anna Karenina the infamous adulterer of Tolstoy’s novel. Vesna Goldsworthy uses the fictional device of making the Karenina-Vronsky story an actual event, which had been fictionalised by the writer Tolstoy. As Albertine gets to know the eponymous Monsieur Ka, his story as a Russian émigré is revealed and she starts to write down his colourful life history.
The author has a good literary eye for the poetic observation of life and events. Her account of the alienating problems that Albertine suffers following her unexpected survival from the War, and the new life that both share in Earls Court is admirable. I felt that Sergei Karenin’s piecemeal account of his varied and privileged life did not work quite as well, and that the voice that the author, via Albertine, tries to capture, was not always fully true. Nevertheless, this is an admirable and fully engaging novel.

This book is said to be a retelling of Anna Karenina. I can't say there's success on this end, but still it's a beautifully written. compelling story.
Our narrator is a young Jewish woman just married to an English officer. Her husband has a mission with his mysterious government job, so travels to Europe, while her wife gets involved with a family of Russian emigres.
The rest is a bit complex and unorganized, yet, I quite liked it.
There's a lot of variety with characters. Immigrants, different races, nationalities, traditionalists, etc.

Overall, I enjoyed it together with its writing, weirdness and variety that it has.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for granting a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Loved this novel. Made me go and buy a copy of Anna Karenina.

An evocative story set in post second war London, but evoking Europe and Alexandria in the telling. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina haunts the story via the exiled Monsieur Ka and in many of the novel's literary twists and turns. That Vesna Goldsworthy is writing in her third language is extraordinary. I will be looking out for her next novel.

My Thoughts

This is an interesting little book, seeking to cover quite an array of themes and stories. And, if I am completely honest, a few too many irons were in this fire for me; at times, I am found myself unsure of the essence of this book - what was it really all about? I have walked away from it a little unsure and a feeling like it’s unfinished.

‘Toska is one of those Russian words,’ Monsieur Carr had said, ‘which have no English equivalents. It means “a dull ache of the soul”.’

Firstly, you have Albertine and her story (along with others in the book) which is most likely the strongest theme, that being, one of displacement and the struggles - not only after a war in her case, but generally the upheaval of leaving. This theme can also be linked to that of her husband and the Russians she encounters throughout. I think the author did a good job of conveying the loneliness and isolation felt, especially considering how frequently Albertine was left alone while her husband traveled throughout postwar Europe.

‘I came to hate her (Anna Karenina) because, when she couldn’t have us both, she wanted that other man, my father’s rival and namesake, more than she wanted me.’

The story I probably enjoyed most was that of Sergei Alexandrovich, whos original surname was Karenin, thus making him the son of Anna from the famous Tolstoy story. The creative inclusion of Anna Karenina's story is truly very clever, helping to interweave the major themes of love and family throughout history - Albertine’s family, her husband Albert’s family and of course, Sergei (Monsieur Ka). I also really appreciated the inclusion of Sergei’s later life - marriage and imprisonment - and the decline of the Old Russian order.

“Prague, Paris, Berlin: they were all full of homeless Russians, once princes and generals, now taxi drivers and doormen in fashionable hotels.”

It was interesting to witness the production of Alexander Korda's film version of the Tolstoy book in which Sergei had a consultation role. Cameo appearances by Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier made it seem that much more real - once again, that clever combination of fact and fiction.

“The fictional lives we read about –your Anna, your Emma Bovary here –are so much more authentic than ours, and not just in the sense that they leave a deeper, more permanent mark on the world, while we, so-called real people, vanish without a trace.”

So you can see, there is quite a deal going on here and I think I would have appreciated a more singular focus on one of the above outlined aspects. All up, it’s about the stories we are told, or tell ourselves, but I just feel the delivery could have been a little smoother. That is not to say that the writing suffers - it is clearly evident that Goldsworthy is a serious writer.

‘We harm no one but ourselves by feeling slighted; we carry acid in our soul even when it eats nothing but the vessel it is stored in.’




This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher and provided through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The quoted material may have changed in the final release

With her wonderful new novel “Monsieur Ka” Vesna Goldsworthy created an exceptional atmosphere reminding me so much of the underlying melancholies found running like a current through Russian classics. She is such a skillful writer. The idea to continue telling a story based on the Karenin family from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is exquisite and she pulls it off beautifully. “Monsieur Ka” is one of these quiet books I always longed to go back to, perfect storytelling.
It is the bitter cold winter of 1947 in post war London. Albertine Whitelaw, a young, newly wed Frenchwoman who met her husband Albie in Alexandria, is trying to feel at home in her cold Earls Court house while he is travelling on covert government business in Europe. Feeling even more lonely and estranged during Albie’s absence, she accepts a job as a companion to elderly Monsieur Carr, a Russian count whose son Alex is looking for someone who can converse and read French to his father after a stroke. Albertine soon discovers Count Carr to be none other than the son of Anna Karenina, Count Sergei Karenin. A deep friendship and trust develops between these unlike exiles and Alex Karenin’s family over the ensuing months which begin to have an effect on her life. As Count Karenin starts telling her about his dramatic life, Albertine decides to surprise him by chronicling his life in a book.
One feels like one is sitting right next to Albertine as she unravels her own life story and that of the Karenin family. An atmospheric literary page turner I greatly enjoyed.

Thanks Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and netgalley for this ARC.

Only Versna Goldsworthy could write this book. Like falling into a dream. Loved the way the characters come alive and come to mean so much to you in just this wonderful book. Unforgettable.

Thanks Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and netgalley for this ARC.

Only Versna Goldsworthy could write this book. Like falling into a dream. Loved the way the characters come alive and come to mean so much to you in just this wonderful book. Unforgettable.

Mournful and evocative, Serbian writer Goldsworthy’s new novel recreates the bleak perspective of post-World War II London as observed by an immigrant/survivor, Albertine Whitelaw, a French Jew married to a British army officer. But that’s only the first layer of this mille feuille of a tale that repeatedly superimposes European history, the merging of nationalities and adoption/adaption of deracinated peoples.

Albertine, lonely in Earl’s Court in 1947, finds employment as companion to one Mr Carr, aka Monsieur Ka, aka Karenin, the Russian count whose mother was Tolstoy’s model for Anna Karenina. Complicated though this may sound, it makes for compelling reading, in what unspools into a curious, cool and powerfully atmospheric view of souls struggling for meaning while tossed on the seas of political and psychic chaos.

Albertine and Ka bond over readings from Madame Bovary. Later, she joins him on a trip to Shepperton where Alexander Korda is making his cinematic version of Anna Karenina, starring Vivien Leigh as the doomed heroine. Thus glamour and romance twinkle occasionally in the dreary landscape of post-war rationing, bomb sites and lingering austerity.

Goldsworthy deftly creates a dark, chilly and foreign world as viewed by the outsider. Alienated both in England and in her very British marriage, Albertine, a richer figure than at first seen, emerges as a loner and a nonconformist. Her intensifying involvement with the Carr family ranges from keeping a written record of M. Ka’s memories of nineteenth-century Russia and escaping the revolution, to a different involvement with his son.

Literature and language obviously play significant roles in the story. Not only is there Flaubert, and M. Ka’s memoir, ghost written by Albertine, but the count also shares with his companion one of the few remaining copies of a children’s book written and illustrated by his mother. Who knew that Anna Karenina wrote fiction? Also, French speaker Albertine, now translated into English, chooses to learn Russian, the better to comprehend her new ‘family’ with whom communication, itself a meld of languages, is symbolic of their journeys.

While the Russian reminiscence can sometimes lie too thickly on the page, the powerful European mood – of sorrow, of catastrophe – lends heft to this vivid re-animation of not-so-distant history. Goldsworthy, author of Gorsky and Chernobyl Strawberries, emerges as a plangent, persuasive voice.

For me, everything was wrong with this novel. The structure was ill chosen with most of the stories told in long conversations that revealed little of the characters and allowed them to develop even less and allowed to narrative to a glacial pace. The central conceit of Anna Karenina as a true story was painfully contrived (it doesn't help that I hate the original), particularly where it was echoed by the "present-day" narrative.

Everything became terribly forced and predictable and yet as each event occurred I found them impossible to believe. The weak characters and lifeless relationships were just incapable of supporting the cumbersome central conceit. There was a total lack of chemistry between the different protagonists in the insipid love triangle that was genuinely painful to read and certainly did not come close to the life and fire of Tolstoy's original characters.

Yet if it were kept simple and free of ludicrous and frankly presumptuous trappings there could have been something worthwhile in Albie and Albertine's story. I would have liked to have seen more of Albertine's émigré struggles and I certainly would have liked to know more of Albie and his experience of war and peace. There could have been emotion and tragedy in that enough without shoehorning in the spectre of Anna Karenina. There was a story with potential here but it was buried so deep beneath an ill-conceived and poorly-executed conceit that it was totally smothered.

A mix of fact and fiction which promises much! Set in London 1947, Albertine is married to a British army officer who works away a lot. Bored and lonely, she takes a job with the Carr family reading in French to an elderly gentleman- Monsieur Ka. As she gets to know the family she realises that Monsieur Ka is actually Sergei Karenin, the son of Anna Karenina. He tells the story of his youth and that of his mother and father, which Albertine records for him. There are some fascinating insights into the London of the late 1940s, a world full of displaced people and war veterans, but somehow I never really felt that the story took off. The story goes on to show the impact of war on some of those who liverpool through it, posing the question of whether you can ever recover.

Goldsworthy’s Gorski adapted The Great Gatsby to a contemporary London setting amongst rich Russians; this book looks as if it’s going to do something similar with Anna Karenina but... doesn’t. It’s hard to quite put a finger on what’s happening here which makes this a perplexing and not wholly satisfying read.

The narrator is a young Jewish woman newly married to an English officer and while he is taken up with his mysterious government job which takes him travelling to Europe, especially a Germany under reconstruction, she becomes involved with a family of Russian emigrés.

And this is where it gets weird because Monsieur Carr (the M. Ka of the title), is Sergei Karenin, the son of Anna Karenina, whose story had been adopted by Tolstoy, and which is being filmed by Alexander Korda in London, with Karenin as a consultant... This dizzying mix of fact and fiction is complicated with further literary references: our narrator is Albertine (think Proust, though she initially plays the role of Tolstoy’s young, married Kitty Levin), there’s also a Tonya (Doctor Zhivago), and someone unexpectedly recreates Anna’s fate...

More pointedly, amidst the literary games, there’s a portrait of a cosmopolitan London filled with refugees, immigrants, and characters with complicated national and racial backgrounds – far more sophisticated and realistic than the mythical ‘Englishness’ that has become such a dangerously potent and divisive figure of rhetoric in today’s politics.

A strange little tale, then, and one that left me bemused: all the literary game-playing feels like it should have some point, but I can’t see what it is.

(To be posted online closer to the publication date)