A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

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It could happen in more intimate settings, too, as in a small class of 20 boxed off in a room looking remarkably like high school classrooms (only with a few tendrils of ivy curling in from the bricks outside the window).

A medida que empiezan a crecer se revelan… un poquito menos perfectos, pero no importa, los quieres igual, así, con sus defectillos que a fin de cuenta han heredado de ti. I love that Saunders’ approach to teaching is to highlight this imperative; that’s where art gets made. A master class in reading great short stories by Russian masters, we first actually read a Saunders-chosen story.We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. In reading, though, don’t we feel it the other way round: as if the story were only there so that for a moment we can contemplate the truth of the detail, of the experience? The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). I appreciated that Saunders mentioned that Master and Man was Tolstoy’s effort, twenty years later, to make something more artful out of his experience of getting lost in a storm than his initial effort in The Snowstorm (which I then needed to find and read; also adding Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain — to learn how a story’s action can be urgently propelled a paragraph at a time — and revisiting Saunders’ own Victory Lap — to experience how a story’s action can go in directions that surprise even its author; I do love a book that leads me to do further reading off the page. But the value of what he does here is makes the reader think what words have been chosen that carry the reader forward?

For one, it was incredibly interesting to read Saunders' own perspectives on these oft-analysed stories. I think I would have actually preferred to see how he would have handled seven stories from different time periods, written with different types of readers in mind. My personal writing approach, which I've suspected might be a little low-rent, is to say, "You know what would be cool? What I loved most about “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” was that I felt like I was again inside the classroom.Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively). Each story--except the first--is read in its entirety and then Saunders walks us through the story pointing out the underlying structural elements which which I for one would have missed. He also appeals to his friends to do good and acknowledges that he is not able of doing it properly which keeps him awake at night.

Either way, reading this book gave me a bit of hope during some really trying times, and if for no other reason than that, I highly recommend this. Or, rather, the incredible closeness of his attention to them makes them more interesting than my all-too-cursory first-reading ever could—what Saunders showed me is just how lame-arsed a reader I can be. In helping me to understand the stories, I did not feel I was reading a review of a story written by a critic. Ours will need to work differently, not only to distinguish them from the older works but so that they will speak to our time as freshly as these Russian stories spoke to theirs. In the case of “The Darling”, the English version got him quite derailed from the original in my opinion.In many ways, thus, a lot of Saunders' analysis and writing was a bit of a repetition of what I've already learnt (like the process of revision - Who cares if the first draft is good? Each story becomes an exemplar of a certain issue that Saunders feels is essential in short story writing--looking at patterns in storytelling, finding the 'heart of the story', and so on.