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and her current worries temporarily set aside by both the beauty of the diary and the allure of possibly discovering an unpublished Chekhov novel.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

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