Stories need to be ruthlessly efficient, never including anything extraneous (there you go again) to their purposes, and they need to deal with a Goldilocks level of expectation: when imagining what comes next in Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’, what developments would disappoint us as being too obvious, or too absurd? The story needs just the right level of expectation-fulfilment:Ĭhekhov’s challenge is to use these expectations he’s created but not too neatly. There are two other key ‘e’ words: efficiency and expectation. Perhaps his key word is ‘escalation’, and he is brilliantly perceptive in showing those micro-moments when a story ‘escalates’, moves forward, in some way, especially if this is not obvious. Saunders has taught these personal favourites for many years, and is superbly adept at guiding us through them, alerting us to their flows and eddies, particularly through skilful questioning. There are three stories by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy and one each by Turgenev and Gogol. His analyses are based on deep experience and an extreme level of attentiveness. Saunders looks at seven short stories he has often taught and knows extremely well (and boy, does he really know them).
It is essentially a series of reflections based on the classes he has run for 20 years at Syracuse University on the Russian short story in translation, and they are unmissable. This book shows he is also plainly an outstanding teacher.
George Saunders is already an acclaimed short story writer, and his only novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Booker Prize.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading and life) is, simply, marvellous.
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