If I were to witness a murder, I figure I’d be like that woman in the Swedish drama “The Breakthrough” who sees the perpetrator straight on but, later, cannot recall a single facial feature. So Saunders’ point about the previous story, about Turgenev’s physical descriptions in “The Singers”, didn’t
Mavis Gallant is sitting “in her apartment on Rue Jean Ferrandi” when, in a “voice gentle yet commanding”, she says “There are two kinds of writers to me, the Tolstoy and the Dostoevsky.” With this Russian project underway, I sat up a little straighter. “And they’re both extraordinary,” she
We’re in a seven-month-long exploration of George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, with the second story: Turgenev’s “The Singers” (1852), first published in his second volume of A Sportsman’s Sketches. Since we last “met”, I’ve been running into George Saunders regularly. He blurbed the insert
