Jean
Thompson was honored as a 1999 National Book Award Finalist
for Fiction for Who Do You Love?.
Photo: Marion Ettlinger
When
I was a kid, I had a habit of reading books that were
entirely beyond me, just because we had them in the
house. One of these was a Modern Library edition of
Chekhov's stories. I still have it; it gives his name
as 'Tchekhov' and the paper's turning brown at the edges,
like an overbaked cookie. In the back is the Complete
List of Titles in The Modern Library, from Henry Adams
to Emile Zola, and my child's over-serious hand has
pencil checked the half-dozen or so that I've read.
"What are you doing with that depressing book?"
my mother demanded, and I couldn't say. The stories
were largely a puzzle to me - what was a samovar, anyway?
A muzhik? - and the world they described might have
existed only between the covers of the book, for all
I knew. But with what clarity and authority and sympathy
it was rendered, what exacting detail and exuberant
emotion. Look at everything it was possible to contain
within the covers of a book.
