She is one of my favorite writers. "The Journalist and the Murderer" is just the best. I love her writing-- it's dense and concise and funny and she creates some of the most well-tuned passages:
If privacy is life's most precious possession, it is fiction's least considered one. A fictional character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his 'real, most interesting life' nakedly exposed. We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other. By intimacy we mean something much more modest than the glaring exposure to which the souls of fictional characters are regularly held up.
-Reading Chekhov
This is definitely eat your spinach reading. Whereas The Journalist and the Murderer and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession feel quick and sexy and full of "eureka!" moments, this one is much more deliberate and the pace is tempered, and it reads a lot more like, well, Chekhov. I had a cursory sense of his life details (I knew he was a doctor, knew he was into nature, knew he was Russian-- hey, that counts), but I wasn't aware of his health struggles, and I knew nothing of his short stories, nothing of his love life, nothing of his ambivalence towards solitude. And if these specifics are implicit in his writing, I was still a bit of a dummy and not picking up on them.
This book is giving me facts, yes, and it's also giving me an interesting framework through which to synthesize those facts (some Russian history, details about Chekhov's family), but it's also giving me permission to read Chekhov in a different way. To search through his plays and stories looking for those moments that reveal all I could want to know about the burden of living and the exquisite beauty of being alive.
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