Book Serendipity, March to May
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away! Feel free to join in with your own.
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- A sister named Fiona in The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright and Leaving Home by Mark Haddon.
- A parent burns a dirty magazine in Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell and The Blood Year Daughter by G.G. Silverman.
- Sabbath chains, Gaelic sermons, and psalm singing on the very pious Isle of Lewis in John of John by Douglas Stuart (set in the 1990s), then Findings by Kathleen Jamie (essay from the early 2000s). I doubt any of the above can still be found there, though we did note “Respect the Sabbath” signs on playground equipment on our 2022 trip.
- A single mother who won’t answer the phone because she’s afraid of who/what it might be in Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker.
- An orphaned narrator named (Eva) Luna in Eva Luna by Isabel Allende and Fountainville by Tishani Doshi. Then I came across a dog named Luna in Transcription by Ben Lerner! And the main character in one story of Baby in a Box by Sarah Braunstein starts going by her nickname, Luna.
- There’s a Muriel Rukeyser poem in the anthology Night Feeds and Morning Songs (ed. Ana Sampson) and Rukeyser is a character in Sophie Ward’s Our Better Natures, which I was also reading at the time.
- Eating boiled ham in Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (and boiled turkey in The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker).
Checking a hotel room for bedbugs in Transcription by Ben Lerner and Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy.
- A young person writing in shorthand in I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and First Class Murder by Robin Stevens.
- A character named Emmie in Transcription by Ben Lerner and (no surprise here) Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory by Barbara Yelin.
- Noting that roses are not suited to a particular climate in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson and Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl.
- A Welsh character named Owain in Fountainville by Tishani Doshi and Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd.
- The Secret Garden is discussed/mentioned in Reading My Mother Back by Timothy C. Baker and Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth, and mentioned in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson.
- The protagonist is emotionless at their mother’s deathbed in Like Mother by Jenny Diski and Leaving Home by Mark Haddon.
- (Apologies: this one is grim.) A young woman is sexually assaulted with a bottle in The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine and The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent (both Irish novelists).
- A husband is involved in a deliberate (suicidal) crash in Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson and one story of I Am the Ghost Here by Kim Samek.
- Ali Baba’s cave is used as a metaphor in The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King.
- A brother- and sister-in-law have an affair in the two Portuguese novels I read on my Portugal holiday, The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge and The Piano Cemetery by José Luís Peixoto.
- A woman describes her discovery of orgasm in The Half Life by Rachel Beanland and The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel.
- ‘There are two kinds of people…’ thinking in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and one story of It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez.
- Money is hidden behind a boiler in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius.
The surname Callaway in The Half Life by Rachel Beanland and Calloway in The Watersmith by Yance Wyatt.
- Louise Erdrich, whose The Mighty Red I was reading at the time, is mentioned in The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting by Robert Irwin.
- A minor character named Genevieve appears in Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen and The Watersmith by Yance Wyatt.
- The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich is the second novel I’ve read within eight months (after The Wedding People by Alison Espach) in which a reluctant bride is saddled with a groom named Gary.
- A mountain lion sighting in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer.
- A character has a love of Agatha Christie novels in The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.
- A character with the nickname Kitten in Nonesuch by Francis Spufford (particularly funny because it’s for a thug) and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- Reading two queer novels with an academic writing course setting at the same time: Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- A remark about the rare beauty of black hair with blue eyes in Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly and My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy.
- An STD is evidence of a husband’s infidelity in The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain and A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello.
- Bottles being used to hold picnic meals / foraged blackberries (noted because these days it would be plastic pots for everything) in Zami by Audre Lorde (the 1940s) and The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain (the 1960s).
Kismet is a character name in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, so I was primed to notice the word being used in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (it’s a synonym for fate).
- A writer who faces the wall to work in The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain (Ted Hughes, that is) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (referring to Alice B. Toklas!).
- A painting of an Arctic tern features in The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge (on the cover) and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- Hot milk is drunk in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson, Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (with Ovaltine), Nonesuch by Francis Spufford, and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- William James is mentioned in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy and Wise by Frank Tallis.
Algerian Muslim men appear in A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello and Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens.
- A pet cat was found on the shore in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- Bringing cherries to an invalid in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- Sex with a woman who has a mastectomy scar in Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly and Zami by Audre Lorde.
- A sighting of a kingfisher as auspicious in Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly and Transcription by Ben Lerner.
- The idea that former lovers leave a mark on people in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Zami by Audre Lorde.
- Pet cat(s) do themselves a mischief by getting into paint supplies in Zami by Audre Lorde and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- A Sandymount, Dublin setting in A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello and Hood by Emma Donoghue.
- An Irish family where the mother and one daughter move to the USA and the father and other daughter stay behind in Hood by Emma Donoghue and The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent (both Irish novelists).
- The concept of a “funeral cake” in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- A character regrets wearing eye makeup on an emotional occasion in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
My second Irish novel of the year that takes place over one week: Hood by Emma Donoghue (after One by One in the Dark by Deirdre Madden).
- A cat of confusing gender: Grace is male in Hood by Emma Donoghue and Bob is always referred to as “it” in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy.
- The idea that it’s rare for a woman to a) be a good storyteller (in The Torrents of Spring by Ivan Turgenev) or b) tell a punchline with a straight face (in The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – at least the man gets called out on his sexist opinion in this case). I also noticed the use of the word “caprice” in both books (and also in Turgenev’s First Love) because it’s unusual and I like it.
- Another grim, grim one: reading two books at the same time in which a woman is / women are drugged and raped while unconscious (A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot and Women Talking by Miriam Toews).
- I read two short stories in quick succession about a peasant porter who carries a broom: “A Real Durwan” by Jhumpa Lahiri (from Interpreter of Maladies) followed by “Mumu” by Ivan Turgenev.
- An older woman insists that she still is/has a little girl inside in The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot.
The number 7 has magical significance for the author in Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt and A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot.
- A couple meets when they see each other reading the same book in an outdoor location: A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave; and The Great Gatsby in Sunset Park by Paul Auster.
- Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For is mentioned in Hood by Emma Donoghue; I was reading a Bechdel book, The Secret of Superhuman Strength, at the same time.
- Gnats are irksome in Sunset Park by Paul Auster and Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Spring Reading, Part II: Helen Bain, Stephen King & Ivan Turgenev
When I posted for the first day of spring, I noted that it was already like early summer in the UK. Today it feels like summer is here to stay. After an April with just 18% of normal rainfall, our pond is looking half-empty. It was a surprisingly chilly mid-May, but really hot weather (low 30s C / high 80s F) is moving in just in time for the bank holiday weekend. Myriad insects find a haven in our lush, unmowed garden full of trees, wildflowers and so-called weeds. Benny is closely supervised on his three or four daily walks in this garden jungle. I love to see swifts wheeling through the sky, but I’d happily sacrifice the sun to get some more rain.
My three selections for this batch of seasonal reading are an excellent forthcoming novel about Sylvia Plath, a historical novella that’s become well known through the movie version, and obscure Russian classics about infatuations that end in heartbreak.
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain
(A quick preview as my full review will be published on Shelf Awareness next month.) A bit of background: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath moved from London to Court Green, a thatched house with two and a half acres of land in North Tawton, Devon (southwest England) in August 1961. They had separated and each moved into lodgings in London – her with their two children – by December 1962, with Plath vowing to return to her beloved house and garden in the spring. Instead, she died by suicide in February 1963. This debut novel covers much of the last 18 months of Plath’s life, but in an inventive way: 16 linked short stories – each from the perspective of a different writer friend, family member, or local acquaintance – illuminate Plath’s personality and state of mind through the interactions they have with her. It’s everyone from her midwife to a washing machine salesman. We learn not just about Plath but also the norms of the time, e.g. through young women she meets at a dress shop and in a BBC recording studio. There are also glimpses into her literary milieu through a visit from Al Alvarez and reminiscences from the Kanes and Merwins. The title refers to her garden’s daffodils, so bountiful that she sells them, which strikes her neighbours as a typically American act of crass gumption. The really genius thing about this structure is that the vignettes go backward in time, so we aren’t approaching her inevitable end but anticipating her prime. Bain’s prose reminds me of Tessa Hadley and Andrew Miller. (Edelweiss) 
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King (1982)
This novella was published in Different Seasons under the heading “Hope Springs Eternal.” You probably know the story better through the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.
“They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring’s crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.”
Andy Dufresne was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover in 1947. While he bides his time until the workings of justice or his own spectacular efforts can get him free, he makes himself useful as the prison librarian and an unofficial financial advisor (he was a banker back in the real world). He fights back against attempted sexual assaults, too. The narrator, Red, can get anyone anything on the black market, and Andy has made two very specific requests over the years: a rock hammer to continue his geology hobby, and a poster of Rita Hayworth to hang in his cell – replaced in turn, as years stretch into nearly three decades, by Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch, and Linda Ronstadt. All along, the hope of there being a life away from this place keeps Andy, and Red, going. Even though I knew what happened thanks to the movie, this was a quick, amusing, and heartening read. I’ll probably go on to read the other three in the omnibus. (Little Free Library) 
The Torrents of Spring (& First Love & “Mumu”) by Ivan Turgenev (1871; 1860; 1854)
[Translated from Russian by Constance Garnett]
I’ve found Turgenev to be a particularly readable Russian master whose novels are short and accessible enough as to not be daunting (unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the like, who I’ve never attempted). I had a bit of confusion over this on, not realising my download included the novella First Love and the short story “Mumu” as well, so The Torrents of Spring ended sooner than I expected. It’s said to be highly autobiographical, but I haven’t looked into the links with Turgenev’s life. Twenty-two-year-old landowner Dimitri Sanin is in Frankfurt as part of a world tour. By chance, he rescues young Emil from a swoon and meets his family of Italian confectioners. Captivated by Emil’s sister Gemma’s simple beauty, he fights a duel to defend her honour and gets her to give up her tedious German fiancé for him. His plan is to stay and remotely sell his estate (complete with serfs) to a fellow Russian abroad – the wife of Polozov, a man he happens to know from childhood. But, as in Dangerous Liaisons, Maria Nikolaevna is a seductive schemer who steals his gaze away from Gemma just because she can. This was a gently Hardyesque tragicomedy about what’s fated versus the decisions and weaknesses that change everything. Turgenev explores what happens when money, love and lust don’t align, and leaves us with the aura of inevitable regret. 
The other two stories share that theme of capricious women. In First Love, sixteen-year-old Vladimir Petrovich is one of many suitors vying for the affections of his next-door neighbour, the young princess Zinaïda. He’s so smitten that when she says jump, he basically asks how high (and it ends up being 15 feet down from a wall). There’s an unexpected twist in this one that makes you question the young man’s family dynamic. The message can be summed up by the advice he’s given by another suitor: “The great thing is to lead a normal life, and not be the slave of your passions.” I was interested to note in both novellas that French is spoken as a marker of the upper classes.
“Mumu” started off promising, but I should know by now that when an animal is a central character in a classic work, it’s not going to go well. Mumu is a spaniel rescued by Gerasim, a giant deaf-mute man who labours on an old woman’s estate. His mistress observes that he’s sweet on Tatiana the laundress and quashes that budding relationship, at which point Mumu enters his life as a sort of replacement. Mumu is utterly devoted to him and suspicious of anyone else – including the mistress, who soon makes it her mission to silence the barking dog. It’s all disappointingly conventional and I wished it could have been otherwise, but I guess Turgenev, like so many other 19th-century authors – Dickens, Flaubert – felt duty-bound to keep women and peasants in their place. 
(Project Gutenberg)
Recent Online Literary Events with George Saunders and Kazuo Ishiguro
I’ve been taking advantage of various free and inexpensive literary events – a bonus of our temporarily virtual-only world. I have five of them stored up to write about, but to keep this post from getting absurdly long I’ll focus on two for now and feature the rest another time.
George Saunders in Conversation with Max Porter
(5×15 event)
Saunders’s latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a written version of the graduate-level masterclass in the Russian short story that he offers at Syracuse University, where he has taught in the Creative Writing Program since 1997. His aim here was to “elevate the short story form,” he said. While the book reprints and discusses just seven stories (three by Anton Chekhov, two by Leo Tolstoy, and one each by Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev), in the class he and his students tackle more like 40. He wants people to read a story, react to the story, and trust that reaction – even if it’s annoyance. “Work with it,” he suggested. “I am bringing you an object to consider” on the route to becoming the author you are meant to be – such is how he described his offer to his students, who have already overcome 1 in 100 odds to be on the elite Syracuse program but might still need to have their academic egos tweaked.
The book is, thus, not just a set of essays on the Russian masters but also a guide to how to write well. It was clear there was mutual admiration between Saunders and Max Porter, who interviewed him. They discussed the revision process as an accumulation of micro-decisions that make the work better. For instance, Saunders compared two Tolstoy stories, “The Snowstorm” and “Master and Man” (written 20 years later), and noted that, though they are thematically similar, the later one is more organized.
Saunders spoke about writing as a dual process of intuition and iteration; a bunch of different “yous” have acted on a text by the time it’s done. Early on in his career, he thought that he had to choose which writer he wanted to be (e.g., Hemingway or Kerouac), but as he aged he realized that the mind is never fixed. He went surprisingly deep into Buddhism at this point, likening writing to meditation – both are practices pursued with intensity. To his younger self, he would say to keep going: improving is simply a matter of time (i.e., that 10,000 hours figure that’s bandied about as necessary for developing expertise).
The only drawback to this event was that Saunders was speaking from his snow-encased upstate New York basement and had a horrible Internet connection; often his voice was faint and delayed, while his image stayed static. We and Porter could only stare gormlessly and wait for his face to move to match his words! I think the book would be too niche for me – I’ve hardly read anything by the Russians, and since I don’t write fiction I’m not in need of a guide to those kinds of writing decisions – but it was nice to ‘meet’ Saunders ‘in person’.
An Evening with Kazuo Ishiguro
(Faber Members / Guardian Live event)
Ishiguro’s new novel, Klara and the Sun, was published by Faber yesterday. This conversation with Alex Clark also functioned as its launch event. It’s one of my most anticipated books of the year, so I pre-ordered a signed copy along with my ticket and look forward to it arriving soon. Klara is an Artificial Intelligence “friend” purchased to combat teenage loneliness. A childlike figure, she is cheerful and treats the sun like a god. Ishiguro said that the book developed from a story he wrote for children aged five to six, about a little girl who takes a doll home – except his daughter, author Naomi Ishiguro, told him no way was it suitable for young children, being far too dark. He likes “displaced or alien narrators, fish out of water,” he said, because the limited perspective allows him to focus on oddness.
In addition to Clark’s questions, a few pre-recorded questions from literary celebs (Daisy Johnson, Bernardine Evaristo, and David Mitchell) encouraged Ishiguro to create a tripartite schema for his novels, reflect on his writing about Japan, and look back at the devices he has used. Asked by Johnson about the connections between his novels, he admitted that his first three novels all retread the same ground: a man who has made a mess of his life or career picks over the past. Then his mid period is set in dreamscapes, while his most recent three novels are dystopian fantasies (though he does not see Klara as set in a dystopian world).
In response to Evaristo’s question about whether he felt an obligation to write about Japan, he said that with his early work he was conscious of needing to represent a group of people who even then (due to World War II) were viewed with suspicion or antipathy. He left Japan at age five so the country didn’t seem entirely real to him. What he knew was based on very early memories, what his mother told him, comic books sent by his grandparents, etc. As he stated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, writing about Japan in his twenties therefore felt like “an act of preservation.” Still, he wants his characters and situations to be universal.
Replying to Mitchell’s three questions (cheeky!), he explained that his first ambition was to be a singer/songwriter, and he wrote 100+ songs. Songwriting taught him minimalism. “You can say a huge amount by what you don’t say,” he noted. He hopes to create spaces, or rather vacuums that suck in the reader’s attention. Unlike Mitchell, he always knows the ending of a book before he begins, and his decisions are all about wanting to lodge in the reader’s brain. Thus, memorable endings are a priority for him, whereas they might not be for other writers. I was struck by his characterization of his own life: when he looks back, he doesn’t see a clear path that arose from his choices; instead, he sees a “weird, incoherent mess.” For this reason, he’s turned against the reflective device of his first three books. If he can come up with a theme, he’s hankering to write a book about hitchhikers in the north of England.
Towards the end of the (overlong) discussion, he mentioned that he has been questioning the novelist’s role due to the events of the past year: wondering about the meaning of fiction when so many have died and so many believe fake news. It was a melancholy but realistic point to end on. While I’m not an Ishiguro completist (The Unconsoled doesn’t appeal to me at all and I’m not sure I can be bothered with When We Were Orphans, but I will try The Buried Giant; I’ve read the rest), the event whetted my appetite to read his new book. (See also this Goodreads interview. I loved the anecdotes about learning he’d won the Nobel!)
Bookish online events coming up soon: The Rathbones Folio Prize announcement on the 24th and Claire Fuller’s book launch for Unsettled Ground on the 25th.
Have you attended any online literary events recently?
Classic of the Month: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Last month’s classic was Father and Son (Edmund Gosse); this month is Fathers and Sons, the 1861 novel by Ivan Turgenev (1818–83). I couldn’t resist pairing up the similar titles, and it turns out that even though one is nonfiction and the other fiction, they are thematically similar, dwelling on the clash of generations and contrasting romanticism and rationalism.
Nikolai Kirsanov’s son Arkady, newly graduated from university, has just returned to his father’s estate with his haughty fellow student Yevgeny Bazarov in tow. Bazarov intends to take a medical degree and follow in his father’s footsteps as a country doctor, so spends the time at his friend’s house dutifully poring over chemistry texts and dissecting frogs. Arkady, by contrast, seems earnest but aimless, happy to simply while away the days. The major change at home is that his father, a widower, has taken the servant girl Fenichka as his mistress and they have a baby, Mitya. (Gasp!) Yet the real shock in the world of the novel seems to be that Nikolai is consorting with someone of the lower classes. “In any case, it’s not for a son to sit in judgment on his father – least of all for me, and least of all with a father like you, who has never restricted my freedom in any way,” Arkady graciously concedes.
Together Nikolai and his rakish brother Pavel (“Women lost their heads over him, and men dubbed him a fop but were secretly envious”) represent an outmoded idealism that values art, nature, poetry, and true love. On the other side is Bazarov, who means to tear down those dated notions and recruit Arkady to the side of realism, even nihilism. “Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it,” he explains to Arkady. But the pals’ notions get uncomfortably muddled when they meet the regal widow Anna Odintsov at the governor’s ball. On extended visits to her country house, Bazarov and Arkady become fixated on her and her younger sister, Katya, but differ in their willingness to give in to love.
Romantic love may be a madness best avoided in some of the characters’ view, but family love is a constant. Even Bazarov, though he makes a show of being embarrassed by their fussing when he goes home briefly after three years away, values his parents’ approval. His father proudly takes him along on his medical rounds, while his superstitious mother buttresses him with her prayers. She reminds her husband that Yevgeny is fundamentally different from them: “A son is an independent person. He’s like a falcon that comes when he wills and flies off when he lists; but you and I are like the funguses growing in a hollow tree.”
I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable and accessible Turgenev’s writing is. My experience with the Russian masters is shamefully limited; Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich might literally be the only thing I’ve read previously. I was worried that all the patronymics, place names, and historical and cultural references would trip me up, but it’s no trouble to adjust to them here. You might think of Fathers and Sons as a friendly way of easing in to works like War and Peace: although elements of the story reminded me of Tolstoy’s epic (as I know it purely from the recent BBC miniseries) – the range of characters, from rich to poor, and their interactions; the long visits to acquaintances; the peaceful countryside; even a duel – it is on a much smaller scale, and has a correspondingly lower page count of about 220.
Something in nearly every character’s psyche rang true for me: Arkady’s relief at being home; Nikolai’s sense of being left behind; Bazarov’s feeling of smallness in an uncaring universe; his mother’s benevolent contentment with the status quo; Madame Odintsov’s well-ordered but purposeless life; and so on. Turgenev’s asides about Russia and about human nature give the narration a playful, knowing quality reminiscent of George Eliot. The idea of fathers and children being on different tracks extends to other forms of paternalism: religion (though this is a minor theme compared to in Father and Son) as well as masters versus serfs. “We all know there’s the master’s will; on account of you bein’ like our fathers. An’ the more strict the master rules, the better it be for us peasants,” as one rustic opines to Bazarov.
This is a thought-provoking but markedly readable classic that I can heartily recommend. Turgenev only wrote five other novels; if they’re all as strong (and roughly as short) as this one, I’d be happy to read them all – and will likely return to Fathers and Sons in the future.
My rating: 
(With thanks to Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings for putting Turgenev on my radar.)
I read a Penguin Classics edition of Rosemary Edmonds’s 1965 translation. Her brief introduction gives helpful background and is a lovely piece of writing in its own right. Beware: only read a literary introduction after finishing the text, because critics assume you know the basic story line and so spoil who falls in love with whom, who dies in the end, etc. My edition is preceded by a lengthy lecture Isaiah Berlin gave on Turgenev in 1970.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 