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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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible. Once I extracted my earlobe from her teeth I ran away and I hid in the coat check room underneath an immense puffer jacket until she left. There is one exception, though, when the validity of interpretation can be questioned because it’s based on the utterly inadequate translation of one of the crucial sentences in the story. Good writing is “the cumulative result of all this repetitive choosing on the line level, those thousands of editing microdecisions”. And as someone who hasn’t read a lot of Russian short fiction — and also as someone who doesn’t feel like I always understood what I did read — this book entertainingly filled voids in my education of which I was only vaguely aware.

I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us. I wish Saunders would move in next door and join our local book club and teach seniors at our local junior college. After each, he steps us through how he reads them and how to feel them (not what to feel but what to think about), figure out what the authors are doing, what they might have done differently, and why the stories work just as they are. Now it has been a while since I had last stepped foot on a campus so I felt I needed to prepare for this book.

Does Drakkar Noir tell you what combination of smells one needs to smear all over themselves to make themselves irresistible to women everywhere? He was trying to show me the techniques used and choices made through which the author had produced something truly great in his opinion. Those unfamiliar with these authors and or Russian literature needn’t feel overwhelmed, Saunders breaks it all down, sharing his thoughts and showing what makes a story worth reading with undisguised joy. Yes, lecturing is, overall, bad educational practice, but sometimes that bromide doesn't hold water.

Perhaps it’s less like applying a series of lessons and more like the training of an intuition that flashes between hand, eye, mind. A book that achieves exactly what it sets out to, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is essentially a writing class in book form.Well, in terms of the complexity, the only complex thing in that character is his natural simplicity. Even ‘The Soulmate” would be better by playing on the Russian relationship between ‘Dushechka” (the original title) and dusha (the soul). What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. There are three by Anton Chekhov, two by Leo Tolstoy, and one each by Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Gogol.

The Nose’ is the story that feels most uncharacteristic in the collection, perhaps because as satire, it takes everything less seriously. Y con cada cambio, reevaluar las consecuencias en la historia de esa palabra que ha aparecido o desaparecido. Saunders himself notes later in his reading the accidental nature of happiness: “Happiness is a gift, a conditional gift. He also has some writing exercises at the end, and a reflection on fiction for making your life and the world (slightly) better.Each story becomes an exemplar of a certain issue that Saunders feels is essential in short story writing--looking at patterns in storytelling, finding the 'heart of the story', and so on. And if that’s the only way we can read foreign literature, short of learning just about every language in which the originals we’d love to read were written, it’s still better than not reading them at all. Nor did it make Hitler and his boys--murders of millions as well, and lovers of literature and music and art--more humane. And the way that Chekhov announces the servant girl’s beauty, without having to describe her at all, is both a comment of Chekhov’s genius and Saunders’s brilliant powers of observation. I, for example, very much disagreed that Turgenev’s “The Singers” was about the contrast between the manipulative pragmatism of technical proficiency and raw emotional expressions.