We get a powerful sense of these characters having lived before the start of this story, and we get a sense of them going on living and developing after the end. It is tempting to describe this as a “slice of life”, but that’s precisely what it isn’t. On the face of it, it doesn’t really seem very promising. And after these three years, the narrative stops at an apparently random point, with nothing resolved. There is a marriage, a death, a baby dies of diphtheria, and a relatively minor character has a mental breakdown. We follow these characters over three years. We are introduced to a group of characters, and, as the narrative proceeds, we meet a few more. The narrative seems to start at a more or less random point. However, for all that, it does communicate what I still feel about this wonderful story, and so, if you have the patience to wade through this, here it is for what it’s worth. It is unstructured – jumping almost at random from one point to another, with little attempt at continuity, and sometimes returning to points that should have been dealt with earlier it makes assertions without argument, and without illustrative excerpts it uses expressions like “superbly depicted” which could mean anything, really (what’s superb about the depiction? Either explain or shut up!) is often repetitive and uses vaguely defined terms like “sentimentalist” without bothering to explain what it means in the context. So I dug it up, and found myself cringing – as I so often do when I read my earlier writings. And I was reminded that, many years ago (14 years ago, to be exact) I had myself written something about it on a book board I used to frequent. Recently, Di Nguyen wrote a post in her blog on a work that is particularly close to my heart – Three Years, a novella (it’s way too long to be classed as a short story) by Anton Chekhov.

The Story of a Nobody by Anton Chekhov