How necessary, at our particular moment' Tessa Hadleyįrom the New York Times- bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves - and our world today.įor the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. 'This book is a delight, and it's about delight too. 'A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion' Guardian Summer Reading Picks 2021 I was pleasurably absorbed from start to finish.Ī Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life by George Saunders (Bloomsbury, £16.PICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, IRISH TIMES, SPECTATOR, TLS, NEW STATESMAN, MAIL ON SUNDAY, I PAPER, PROSPECT, REVEW31 AND EVENING STANDARD AS A BOOK OF 2021 His book is what every lover of pre-Revolution Russian literature needs close by: not an academic interpretation, but a reader’s companion.
Saunders can neither speak nor read Russian, yet he has studied his adored Russian writers in the faithful, if now slightly fusty, Constance Garnett translations of the 1920s, which remain good enough. Kafkaesque? Gogol’s is less a proto-surrealist fable of identity, Saunders argues, than an exercise in blunt realism, that scrutinizes the topsy-turvy world of Tsarist officialdom. Tolstoy, a moral-ethical giant, towered above his predecessor Gogol, whose satirical short story ‘The Nose’, written in around 1836, relates how a nose detaches itself from the face of a St Petersburg petty official and develops a life of its own. Tolstoy’s is the “kind of story I want to write”, Saunders says, “the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.” A wealthy merchant-landowner sets out with his serf across a frozen immensity of tundra, only to get fatally lost. ‘Master and Man’, Tolstoy’s great 1895 parable of social inequality and sacrifice, unfolds in a December snowstorm. If Chekhov is tantalizingly elusive, Tolstoy conjures an atmosphere of impassive Christian grandeur. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
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