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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Silver Falls Library | FIC ANDERSON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Anderson, A. 2016 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
What if Anton Chekhov, undisputed master of the short story, actually wrote a novel--and the manuscript still existed? This tantalizing possibility drives The Summer Guest, a spellbinding narrative that draws together, across two centuries, the lives of three women through the discovery of a diary.
During the long, hot summer of 1888, an extraordinary friendship blossoms between Anton Chekhov and Zinaida Lintvaryova, a young doctor. Recently blinded by illness, Zinaida has retreated to her family's estate in the lush countryside of Eastern Ukraine, where she is keeping a diary to record her memories of her earlier life. But when the Chekhov family arrives to spend the summer at a dacha on the estate, and she meets the middle son Anton Pavlovich, her quiet existence is transformed by the connection they share. What begins as a journal kept simply to pass the time becomes an intimate, introspective narrative of Zinaida's singular relationship with this doctor and writer of growing fame.
More than a century later, in 2014, the unexpected discovery of this diary represents Katya Kendall's last chance to save her struggling London publishing house. Zinaida's description of a gifted young man still coming to terms with his talent offers profound insight into a literary legend, but it also raises a tantalizing question: Did Chekhov, known only as a short story writer and playwright, write a novel over the course of their friendship that has since disappeared? The answer could change history, and finding it proves an irresistible challenge for Ana Harding, the translator Katya hires. Increasingly drawn into Zinaida and Chekhov's world, Ana is consumed by her desire to find the "lost" book. As she delves deeper into the moving account of two lives changed by a meeting on a warm May night, she discovers that the manuscript is not the only mystery contained within the diary's pages.
Inspired by the real friendship between Chekhov and the Lintvaryov family, landowners in the Ukraine, The Summer Guest is a masterful and utterly compelling literary novel that breathes life into a vanished world, while exploring the transformative power of art and the complexity of love and friendship.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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." (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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 whimsof fate and of their ownthat 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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 action that 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.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The lives of three women living centuries apart converge in their singular relationship with a single manuscript: the late-19th-century diary of Zinaida Lintvaryova, a physician and daughter of a landowning Ukrainian family who has lost her sight. Zinaida recounts the summers when the Chekhov family - including their son, Anton Pavlovich - rented the guesthouse of her family's property in the country. In the present day, a beleaguered London publisher, Katya Kendall, enlists Ana Harding, an American living in a village in France, to translate Zinaida's journal into English, hoping its publication will rescue her press from bankruptcy. The novel progresses in alternating chapters, moving from Zinaida's recollections of her intimacy with Chekhov to Katya's anxieties over the fates of her business and her marriage and Ana's professional insecurities as an "invisible" translator rather than "the more glamorous author." (It is worth noting that Anderson is herself a translator as well as a novelist.) The book blurs the line between firsthand experience and imagining worlds one cannot know, either because of blindness or the removals of time and geography, and renders authentic and memorable portraits of its three heroines.
Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.