SUNSTROKE

The 25 smoothly translated stories in this collection have the emotional depth of Chekhov and the inspired acuteness of Raymond Carver or John Cheever, making them truly ahead of their time: Bunin, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1933), deserves renewed attention. A few of the book's shorter stories—only a few pages each—intensely portray moments of anger, love and pain to demonstrate larger truths about human behavior. "First Class" recreates the discomfort a group of upper-class passengers feel when a peasant enters their train compartment, freezing the juxtaposition of the passengers' disdain and the peasant's awkwardness like a snapshot. In the longer stories, small pains accumulate until they explode into tragic ironies. In "Raven," a young man develops an affection for a fetching nanny his father has hired, much to the father's dismay; the older man later marries the nanny. As a storyteller in "Ida" spins a tale of lost opportunity for romance, it becomes clear that the failure was his own. Other stories strip away characters' defenses with elegance and precision: the title story, for instance, describes a lieutenant's short-lived affair with a woman he meets on a cruise. When the affair ends, she ascribes their passion to a momentary sunstroke, leaving him heartbroken and spiritually lost. The plots of Bunin's stories are not necessarily original, but their force and animation never fail to surprise; a brief introduction by the translator serves to put the writer in historical context. (Apr. 5)