Book of 2023: Short Stories and Lit Crit

In a good reading year, my favorite book of 2023 stands head and shoulders above the rest.  Only George Saunders could make Russian literature palatable to yours truly.  I found this book magical and utterly unique.  It made me feel like I was back in college in the best way.

The Book of the Year

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders, 2021

My friend Tom Persinger and I have a running joke about how I'm always trying to read down my "to read" list, and he's always trying to add books to it, thwarting my mission.  In this case, though, credit where credit is due: taking a Tom recommendation proved a wise move.  Here, George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo (which I have not read) and Syracuse writing professor, collects 7 of the forty Russian short stories he teaches in one of his courses and follows each up with commentary and interpretation on how the story is working.  With specific examples from the story, he breaks down how Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev "make characters" and decide about what should happen in the "meaningful action" - Saunders doesn't like the word "plot."  Honestly, the idea of reading Russian short stories did not entice me; the interstitial essays did.  That played out as expected; some of these stories may have felt like pointless slogs without Saunders coming along to show why there was more going on than I originally appreciated.  He reveals that he is a meticulous editor, going over his work "thousands of times" testing each turn of phrase for whether the needle in his internal rating system points to "positive" or "negative."  That is, if he finds anything wrong with a turn of phrase, he changes it before moving on to the next phrase, testing and changing if needed.

Even used copies of this pretty-recently-published book sell at text book prices, which makes sense.  Saunders essentially provides a condensed version of his course complete with reading list and "lectures."  The essay chapters kept me deeply engaged, and one could totally write one's own essays in response to occasional prompts to go back and reread and reimagine - rewrite - certain parts of the story.  Reading this on paper, I wonder if I'd have gotten through it; instead, I consumed it as an audio book because that was the easier form to borrow from my library.  That turned out fortuitous.  The audio book features famous actors - including Phylicia Rashad, Rainn Wilson, BD Wong, Nick Offerman, and Renee Elise Goldsberry - voicing the stories and Saunders himself sing songing through the essays.  Paige listened to one set - story and commentary - in the car with me on our way to our final Oberlin parents' weekend.  Over the course of the book, I surprised myself by coming to enjoy the stories, but I always looked forward to being challenged to think more deeply about a story by hearing Saunders's take on it.  If you get a copy and can read only one story-essay pair, read Gogol's "The Nose' and its essay.  A special gem of a book.