We’re in a seven-month-long exploration of George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, with the second story: Turgenev’s “The Singers” (1852), first published in his second volume of A Sportsman’s Sketches.

Since we last “met”, I’ve been running into George Saunders regularly. He blurbed the insert with the new “Granta”,and I read an interview with Dave Eggers (conducted by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager). Eggers describes how Saunders and Tobias Wolff shifted the writing program at Syracuse away from competition towards collaboration: so “different than it was in the ‘70s, when it was kind of nastier, where writers … had to one-up each other and fight in public”. These two are “big-hearted, warm people who created radically different atmospheres from other creative writing programs”.

Rebecca U. wrote to say that she spotted Saunders’ AWiaPitR as well: in a recent Marginalian (taunting her, it would seem, as she remains somewhere in the vicinity of page three). Some lovely quotations and comments. Bill’s posted on Saunders and the first story here, Bron on the story here.

In early March, I spent more time looking for other work by Russian writers than I spent with Saunders. I read Turgenev’s first paragraph of story, thought “nope, not today”, and looked for other Russian stuff. Then, it was the middle of the month: today arrived.

Bron is reading the stories independent of Saunders’ commentary, and Bill read this story straight through before reading Saunders’ commentary; I chose to revisit the questions that Saunders posed for the first story. He had prompted readers to pause at the end of the first page of “In the Cart” (and consider why they wanted to read on. But I had put down “The Singers” after just one paragraph; perhaps, if I had read right to the end of the first page, I’d’ve had a different response.

This made me curious. More curious than I felt when I reached the end of the first page. But, by then, I had located my notebook and there was space to write. Answering Saunders’ questions was easier this time. But the story itself was harder. I constantly had to reset myself, track back into the description—of the land and the village and the characters—and reread to catch the bits I’d missed.

The part I most enjoyed was seeing how the chasm, described in the opening paragraphs, reappears at different points in the story. (When Saunders writes about this, he describes it as Turgenev displaying different aspects of a binary perspective. It happens a lot, he says, and, most satisfyingly, none of the examples he gives were ones that I had noticed myself.)

What I had tasked myself with, however, was peering to find the reason that this story could be considered “resistance literature”.  I marked the passage at the end of page 15 (I love how the story’s pages are numbered separately within Saunders’ pagination), with the buoyant seagull in flight. And the heavy layer of heat hanging over everything on page 17. Freedom and oppression, perhaps. Subtle—but, necessarily so.

Saunders describes his students’ impatience with Turgenev’s seemingly endless descriptions and digressions. Saunders says: “let’s face it, at times the story is rough going.” He creates a table outlining each page’s contents, italicizing those which concretely advance the action. (A contest between two singers in a pub in rural Russia=action.)

But each seemingly-actionless page “creates a sort of ascending ladder of credibility”. This group of men are listening to this pair of singers, and Turgenev’s descriptions and backstories allow readers to interpret the performances. We learn how to judge the ways in which the singers are judged, so that we can approach the heart of the story.

The final scene, too, could be dismissed as a tangent or heralded as an epiphany. (I did have the same emotional response to that scene—it recalled that feeling of Maria seeing her past life reflected in the windows of a passing train—but I overlooked the few words that Turgenev uses to signal that the two boys’ voices can be viewed as part of a “song”. That knits it all together beautifully.)

In his Afterthought for this story, I enjoyed Saunders’ self-deprecating view of his early stories, and his struggle to find his voice, with is both less than he’d hoped (he’s no Hemingway, as he puts it) and more (because it’s authentic).

Ultimately, Saunders is discussing art while figuring out how we can discuss art. He takes issue with the traditional view that a writer always has a clear intention and executes it. “The actual process, in my experience,” he says (emphasising that each reader brings their own experiences to any story), “is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.”

At last, I’m getting comfortable with this project. But when April comes, will I be tempted to ghost my [The] Darling [by Chekov]?

But what do YOU think?