A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

W H Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts famously begins: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters.” George Saunders’ surprisingly affirmative new book is a bit like being taken around a literary museum by a curator. His Old Masters are Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, and the book presents seven works by them, and then Saunders’ insights about them having taught a course on the Russian short story at Syracuse University for many years.

Saunders’ book has an unusual structure, in that the reader is given the whole text – In the Cart, The Darling and Gooseberries by Chekhov; The Singers by Turgenev; Gogol’s The Nose; and Master and Man and Alyosha the Pot by Tolstoy. The reading of what you have read comes afterwards, with the exception of In the Cart. There is then in each case an “Afterthought”, and three appendices of writing exercises. Of course, one doesn’t need a pandemic and a lockdown to find an excuse to return to these Russian masters, and it was certainly not without profit, interest and joy to re-read them.

The book is subtitled “In which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading and life”. The best parts are where Saunders advocates a kind of slowness of reading. It might sound platitudinous, but he states something so obvious it is overlooked. When you start reading a story you don’t know what happens next. What works here is his insistence on the reader hooking themselves up to a kind of bookish cardiograph: what do we think of this character now? How does this change