The Summer Guest
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The translator of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Alison Anderson, delivers a remarkable literary novel—with a stunning conclusion—inspired by historical events, in which a diary weaves together the lives of three women: a dying Ukrainian doctor who befriends Anton Chekov in the 19th century, a modern-day London book editor, and the woman she hires to translate it into English.
During 1888, illness forces a young Ukranian doctor, Zinaida Mikhailovna, into premature retirement on her family’s rural estate. When a St. Petersburg family rents an estate cottage for the summer, Zinaida—newly blind from the condition that will eventually kill her—befriends the son, Anton Pavlovich. He is a writer of modest but growing fame who will soon be known to the world simply as Chekhov, an author renowned for his mastery of the short story . . . and for the fact that he never published a novel.
This historical narrative is framed around fragments of truth: Zinaida was real. The eldest daughter of the Lintvariov family—land-owners in Ukraine who rented a cottage to the Chekhovs in 1888—she was afflicted by a brain tumour. Chekhov wrote to his friend Aleksey Suvorin about her and her stoic acceptance of her fate. He also wrote her obituary.
In the frigid winter of 2014, Zinaida’s diary lands in translator Ana Harding’s inbox, sent by the proprietor of a small London press. Katya Kendall hopes to rescue the failing press, and her failing marriage, by publishing an English translation. Ana accepts the poorly paid project as a distraction from professional and romantic disappointments, and is soon consumed by Zinaida’s intense, reflective narrative of two summers spent with the Chekhovs as she confronts her death. In its pages, there are tantalizing hints indicating that Chekhov did write a novel, inspired by Zinaida during their time together, and Ana becomes obssessed with tracking it down. But, as her search intensifies, she realizes the hidden novel is just one of several mysteries surrounding the diary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
