I … refuse the quote the first sentence of Anna Karenina, which is usually trotted out in these circumstances, principally because I think it is false. The truth is that unhappy families are more alike than happy families. Unhappiness takes the universal forms of bitterness, resentment, and the symptom to which Kafka dedicated an entire novel—psychological arrest at an early stage, preventing emotional growth and development.
I love Anna Karenina, but I agree that its famous opening sentence gets things backward. I also did not know until that David had reviewed Joshua Henkin's The World Without You, which I also reviewed and agree is excellent.
'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.' The opening sentence of Nabokov's Ada.
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