First Meeting

I found Anna Karenina lying on top of a pile of magazines, about a year ago, on the corner of 3rd Street and Prospect Park West, in Brooklyn. It is the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, published in the year 2000, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

The previous owner seems to have abandoned the book with as much care as possible, making sure its cover was visible to the by passers, even from inside a supermarket box. All visible traces of this reader vanish on page 36 (the upper left corner of the page is folded), except for the handwritten inscription —its lilac ink mirroring by chance the color of the cover’s flowers— at the end:

fastidious (adj) — hard to please
pellucid (adj) — transparent, clear, easily understandable

But which one of these refers to the reader, or to Anna, or Tolstoy, or the novel?