A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

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En estos días, en los que a pesar de estar tan interconectados gracias a la tecnología es tan fácil sentir que perdemos el vínculo con lo que realmente importa, la lectura ayuda a conectar de nuevo o, al menos, a creer que esa conexión sigue siendo posible. Still, there is sufficient ambivalence in Turgenev’s construction of the story to be open to his approach as perfectly valid too.

He was trying to show me the techniques used and choices made through which the author had produced something truly great in his opinion.

I have sometimes wished to be like those who could live their lives by a creed; those who decided to give their lives to a single religious precept and live every day under that credo; those who marry one person and live together for the rest of their lives. There is something essential ridiculous about critics, anyway," said Randal Jarrell, a pretty good critic himself. What I appreciated is how Turgenev showed that the passion for vocal art is universal and that these two schools of thought about vocalism can be instinctively felt by anyone, including the impoverished peasants in the remote and isolated lands. Or, rather, the incredible closeness of his attention to them makes them more interesting than my all-too-cursory first-reading ever could—what Saunders showed me is just how lame-arsed a reader I can be.

Saunders nunca ha encontrado especialmente útiles conceptos como “tema”, “argumento”, “desarrollo de personajes” o “estructura”, tan comunes en los cursos de escritura creativa. What the protagonist is really talking about is the fact that what brings true meaning to life is not happiness, but the good we do to others—and also the bad we leave behind. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.Their passion for literature (evident in their questions from the floor, our talks at the signing table, the conversations I've had with book clubs) has convinced me that there's a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world---a web of people who've put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting. Since I haven’t read literary fiction since high school, I can’t speak to their representation for their class or culture, but Saunders does share some of his thoughts on each as well.

I highlighted far more passages in this book than I could reasonably share — there are so many directions this review could have taken — but this last one hit me personally: My very favourite books have always compelled me to say that they “charmed” me and I have to pay respect to an author who understands that, as a reader, I approach every book with this willingness to be charmed; that my least favourite reads are those that — through sloppy, illogical, lazy writing — make me feel disrespected instead. With his newest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders pretty much publishes the MFA class on writing that he has taught at Syracuse for over twenty years. What I loved most about “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” was that I felt like I was again inside the classroom. I read all seven short stories, reviewing them separately and then enjoying Saunders teaching me about the way he sees each story works, each one of them a masterpiece to Saunders.

There is so much here that teaches us about the art of the short story form, the marvel of the Russian literary tradition (and Saunders' unquestionable love for it), as well as about living with a genuinely generous heart and open mind. Sometimes I had an entirely different take on the story because I brought in my own experience and inclinations.

And alas, the Summer I was planning traveling abroad through Europe seems to be falling through as every time I mention it to my dear wife steam shoots out of both her ears and her face turns an alarming shade of red.What I ended up doing after laboriously working through the first three stories, is reading Saunder’s analysis and then going back and reading the stories. The book includes seven Russian short stories (3 from Chekhov, 2 from Tolstoy, 1 from Gogol, and 1 from Turgenev). All the same, it’s not an MFA textbook (though highly useful for those who would like to attend or teach in MFA programs), because it’s also intended for a general reader and Saunders skillfully makes his teaching adaptable into the discussion about many aspects in reading this literary form. The men admire her beauty even as she does all the work to make them comfortable, highlighting Ivan’s hypocrisy. Saunders continues through the stories, vacillating from a literary-analysis viewpoint of ‘what could this mean.