The Summer Guest

March 28, 2016
This subtle and haunting novel from novelist and The Elegance of the Hedgehog translator Anderson intertwines the lives of three women whose fragile worlds are on the edge of collapse. Katya Kendall, a Russian emigre, hopes the translation of a diary by an obscure Ukrainian doctor at whose family home Anton Chekov spent two summers will save her troubled British publishing house along with her marriage. Translator Ana Harding finds her solitude and her current worries temporarily set aside by both the beauty of the diary and the allure of possibly discovering an unpublished Chekhov novel. But the most piercing story belongs to the diary’s author, Zinaida Lintvaryova, or Zina, trapped by blindness and a deepening illness at her family home of Luka, on the river Pysol, in the year 1888, who finds reprieve in her notable guest, also a doctor, on the cusp on literary stardom. Mournful and meditative, the diary’s bittersweet passages on Zina’s illness and darkened life are punctuated by lively exchanges with the charming and ambitious Chekhov. The novel is deeply literary in its attention to the work of writing and translation, but also political in its awareness of how Russian-Ukrainian relations have impact on the lives of Anderson’s heroines (both the historical and present ones). Ardent Chekhov fans will appreciate a brief immersion in the world he must have known for two summers, while readers of any stamp can enjoy the melancholy beauty of a vanished world and the surprise twist that, at the end, offers what all three characters have been searching for—“something completely unexpected and equally precious: another way of seeing the world.”

April 15, 2016

The cast and settings: 1) Katya and Peter, a married couple struggling to keep their London publishing firm afloat. They're about to translate and publish the manuscript of a recently discovered diary kept by a young Russian woman when Anton Chekhov (the "summer guest") visited her family's estate more than 100 years ago. 2) Ana, a divorcee hired by the publishing firm to translate the diary. Ana has high hopes of making a name for herself, and getting a new life, with her translation. 3) Zinaida Lintvaryova, a young doctor blinded by illness who is keeping the aforesaid diary, in which she records her observations of the large Chekhov family during a summer on the Lintvaryova estate in what was then the Ukraine. The interplay between past and present--between the events described in the diary as against the hopes of publisher and translator--draws readers into the novel and enables them to believe they have actually met the great playwright. The character Chekhov's take on "so-called ladies' novels" and romantic love is especially illuminating. VERDICT Anderson, a noted translator responsible for the English version of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, has a sure touch in dealing with her material. An impressive work, highly recommended to lovers of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/2/15.]--Edward Cone, New York

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2015

Having already lost her sight to a fatal illness, young Ukrainian doctor Zinaida Lintvaryova befriends the son (a doctor and writer) of a Moscow family renting a cottage on her family's estate in summer 1888. In 2014, Katya Kendall hopes to rescue the floundering London publishing house where she works by publishing the diary in which Lintvaryova chronicles her friendship with Anton Chekhov. A fact-based novel from a formidable literary translator; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2016
A newly uncovered 19th-century diary describes a brief but vivid friendship between the writer and a young Anton Chekhov. The literary press that Katya Kendall runs with her husband is in danger of failing when they come across a project that could keep them afloat: a diary, written in Russian in the late 19th century, by a young woman named Zinaida Mikhailovna. Trained as a doctor, Zina, as her family calls her, has recently been blinded by an unnamed illness. She's dying, but she begins writing in the diary to keep herself occupied. (She uses a notched ruler to track her writing across the page, since she can't see it.) But what makes this diary truly momentous is Zina's friendship with a young man whose family rents the guesthouse connected to her family's rural estate. Like Zina, the young man, Anton Pavlovich, has been trained as a doctor, but he is also a writer. Katya and the translator she hires to work on the diary, Ana, immediately recognize this young man as Anton Chekhov. Anderson, herself a translator (of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, 2008, among other things) and author of two novels (Darwin's Wink, 2004, etc.), has written a gorgeous elegy to a great Russian writer. Her Chekhov is a witty and mercurial but gentle and kind man who spends long afternoons with Zina, discussing everything from his writing (which he insists he only engages in to put "bread on the table") to Zina's fear of dying. But Chekhov forms only one facet of this remarkable novel, which is also a moving account of three women separated by time, nationality, and geography and how each comes to terms with her own life. Like Zina, both Katya and Ana are, to greater or lesser degrees, isolated from others and, because of that isolation, thrown into a period of reflection. Like Zina, they ruminate upon the past, the various whims--of fate and of their own--that have steered them to where they are now. Anderson's characterizations of Katya, Ana, Zina, and the young Chekhov are delightfully complex, and she treats them with patience, sensitivity, and sympathy. Her prose is the height of elegance. Here's hoping that she follows this novel with more of her own. An exceptional novel about the transcendent possibilities of literature, friendship, and contemplation.

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Starred review from March 1, 2016
A leisurely story of everyday life's minor dramas in which what isn't said and what doesn't happen are more important than dialogue and actionthat sounds Chekhovian, and, in fact, Anderson's elegant historical novel, narrated from multiple perspectives, features the Russian writer as a character. Ana Harding is hired to translate a Russian diary penned by Zinaida Mikhailovna Lintvaryova, friend of Chekhov's, over two seasons in the Ukrainian countryside. The publishers are counting on the diary's prospective popularity for their company's solvency and on Ana to keep it secret until publication. The main story, told in the diary, meanders through lazy days of country summers and conversations between Zinaida Mikhailovna and Anton Pavlovich (Chekhov), laden with unspoken meaning and almost clinical verbal dissections of the varied characters and their exploits. Zina's blindness and impending death add a powerful metaphor and another level of perception to their relationship. This alluring and deceptively ingenuous novel demands close consideration from its readers, contains an internal mystery, and packs a heartbreakingly lovely emotional punch. Readers may also enjoy Anthony Doerr's deeply affecting All the Light We Cannot See (2014), which features a very perceptive blind character, and Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, which offers similarly subtle humor and character sketches.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)