The Summer Guest

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and her current worries temporarily set aside by both the beauty of the diary and the allure of possibly discovering an unpublished Chekhov novel.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)