Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent

A Cold War romance reveals a lost world of mid-century art, culture, and political adventurism in the exquisite latest from novelist Pears (Arcadia). Soviet curator Larissa Salmina and British art historian Francis Haskell met and married in the 1960s, but not in the way readers might assume—Salmina was no dissident (she had to be talked into leaving Russia), though she was not starry-eyed about the regime either (she joked that her family was fond of Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD, because he killed the man who tortured her uncle). Pears uses the seemingly unlikely nature of the couple’s relationship to explore the era’s contradictions and nuances. Of the two, Haskell felt far more repressed—an Iraqi Jew, he never felt accepted at Eton and Cambridge—and it was the open and free Salmina who “saved” him by drawing him out of his shell. Salmina, meanwhile, was not overly bothered by the political repression of her homeland; while still living there, she cavalierly engaged in small acts of resistance without much apparent concern. Yet the two lovers also had much in common. By constructing a carefully layered account of their milieus, Pears shows that they were living “parallel lives” a continent apart, mostly hinging on their commitment to art—a common cultural currency that spanned Europe. It makes for captivatingly counterintuitive view of the postwar era. (Aug.)