Tolstoy

In 1984 Innocenzo Monti died after a short illness. He and the writer Lalla Romano had been married since 1932 and had met in the late 1920s in her native Piedmont. Romano – a poet, painter and the author of 19 novels – wrote the story of their life together in her 1987 book Nei mari estremi, rendered as In Farthest Seas by the translator Brian Robert Moore. The structure of the book – an auto-fictional memoir – is bifurcated. The opening, shorter, part deals with the first four years of the relationship, from the moment of their first encounter (he was ‘wearing hiking boots, we were in the mountains’), to their early sexual explorations. ‘Discomfort, effort, labour’ is luckily replaced by ‘bliss’ that was ‘beautiful, even a little exalting’.

For several centuries, the word ‘celebrity’ meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by ‘genius’. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal.

At an improbable soirée in 1987, Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances to the young model Naomi Campbell when the septuagenarian philosopher A.J. Ayer stepped in to demand that the boxer desist. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ snarled Tyson. ‘And I,’ replied Ayer, ‘am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our fields. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.’ And while Campbell sensibly slipped away, the odd couple did just that.

George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories by four Russian masters of the form: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. His critical observations can be taken as the manifesto for his own work. (The winner of the 2017 Man Booker prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, he is still best known as a short story writer.) It’s fair, then, to apply his stated rules to the pieces in his new collection. The last story, ‘My House’, although briefer, holds up well against Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’. The title immediately contains a twist, because it’s not the narrator’s house, even though the historical building is for sale and he can easily afford the asking price.

David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews and reprint them – without any of his answers – under themes of Childhood, Art, Envy, Capitalism etc. The idea is that the questions put to him are just as revealing as his responses. This is a gimmick, but not merely that. To map how others interrogate us is an original idea. It follows that the best way of testing whether this works for the length of a book, even one as short as this, would be for the book to be reviewed by someone who had no prior knowledge of Shields. In this, I’m your man. My ignorance of him was immaculate – and I’ve kept it that way, for the duration.

When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high drama with heroic misadventure in a comico-lyrical amalgam of history and domestic detail that enchants from start to finish. Why Paustovsky is not better known outside his native Moscow is a mystery. In the mid-1960s he was nominated for the Nobel prize. (He was pipped to the post by Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of the obediently propagandist And Quiet Flows the Don.) Denounced as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ by the Soviet Writers’ Union, Paustovsky belonged to that select band of writers who inspire true fandom.

‘The story that Jay Parini recounts in Borges and Me is untrue,’ a recent letter in the TLS claimed, ‘and it should be understood as fiction.’ The author, Maria Kodama, Borges’s widow and literary executor, has also told the press that she ‘will have to act in some way or other’ should the book come out in Argentina. Borges memoirs have long exceeded the master’s oeuvre by what must amount to the library of Babel in volume. The author of one classic of the genre, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Borges’s translator and collaborator, told me a decade ago: ‘I’m not going to lie to you now and say, you know, we were so close Borges cried every time he saw me.