A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
‘Does this feed energy to the heart of my story?’
That was my key take-away from George Saunders’ practical guide to the writing, as illustrated through the work of four Russian Greats. I’ve been asking myself that question in every short story, every email, every text message I’ve written since. Too much of the time, the answer is no. But that’s OK, because George Saunders has unlocked my critical reading abilities like a double jump in a platformer game.
‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain’ is your new handbook, not just to Tolstoy or Chekhov, but to all of literature. Saunders has prepared an engaging journey through the mind of these classic authors, and aims to hone his reader’s critical eye along the way. Each chapter introduces a different short story accompanied by a full and detailed critique from Saunders. If you are intimidated or bored by the idea of reading these stories – don’t be. Saunders will show you what there is to love about them in the least annoying way.
Saunders is himself a charismatic and technically fluent author. Anyone who enjoyed his Booker Prize-winning ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ will recognise his wit and enthusiasm for breaking literary conventions. With many years of experience teaching creative writing at Syracuse, he understands how to bring ‘the classics’ to life for his students. He doesn’t simply describe the genius of the story. He gets inside the author’s head and deconstructs each literary unit. He exposes the cogs and wheels of the text and gives his reader the words to describe exactly why each paragraph on the page works (or doesn’t – Saunders is a self-confessed megafan of these authors, but he can acknowledge when Turgenev is going on a bit). Saunders instills his student with an appreciation for the story, and then lets them in on the mystery of its creation.
This is a practical and highly enjoyable read, particularly for any student of literature or creative writing, and will undoubtedly appear at the top of many reading lists to come. Now, I’m off to finally read War and Peace.
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Sarah Jones 
Nice
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The desperate, botched rescue operation is a common feature in Saunders’s work, and his fiction itself has the feeling of a rescue operation — on us, the reader. He’s moved by an evangelical ardor where fiction is concerned, intent on how it can help us “become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional,” as he put it in a viral commencement speech. These particular hopes have never been more precisely, joyfully or worryingly articulated than in his new book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” an analysis of seven classic Russian short stories. If there are few more treacherous places to turn up than as a character in a George Saunders story — he might have you slapping yourself in the face with your own amputated hand, as he condemns one miserable case — there might be no cushier place than to be a student in his classroom.
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