{"product_id":"an-evening-with-claire-isbn-9781782276050","title":"An Evening with Claire","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe lyrical first novel of youth and love by acclaimed modernist master Gaito Gazdanov, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Spectre of Alexander Wolf\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo old friends meet nightly in Paris, trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings. Throughout the ten years of their separation, thoughts of Claire lingered persistently in Kolya's mind. As the imagined romance finally becomes real, Kolya is thrown into recollections of formative moments from his youth in Russia, from his solitary early years through military school and service in the White Army in the Civil War, all leading to this union with Claire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first novel by the celebrated Russian master Gaito Gazdanov, \u003ci\u003eAn Evening with Claire\u003c\/i\u003e is a lyrical, finely crafted portrait of a lost innocence and a vanished era.\u003ci\u003e“An Evening with Claire\u003c\/i\u003e is a masterfully crafted book that not only deserves but demands renewed attention.”--\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The Gazdanov revival... is nothing short of a literary event\"\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eTLS\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Pushkin Press is to be congratulated on reviving an author who is as relevant now as ever\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eSpectator\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A fascinating writer\"\u003cb\u003e--\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eIrish Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Gazdanov's work is the perfect fusion of the Russian tradition and French innovation\"\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eGaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) joined the White Army aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War. Exiled in Paris from the 1920s onwards, he eventually became a nocturnal taxi-driver and quickly gained prominence on the literary scene as a novelist, essayist, critic and short-story writer, and was greatly admired by Maxim Gorky, among others. \u003ci\u003eThe Spectre of Alexander Wolf\u003c\/i\u003e was published by Pushkin Press to great acclaim in 2013.Claire was ill. For whole evenings I would sit up with her, and, each time I\u003cbr\u003e left, I would invariably miss the last Métro and end up going on foot from\u003cbr\u003e rue Raynouard to the place Saint-Michel, in the vicinity of which I lived. I\u003cbr\u003e would pass by the stables of the École Militaire; from there I could hear the\u003cbr\u003e clanging of the chains to which the horses were tethered and smell that\u003cbr\u003e thick equine aroma so uncommon in Paris; then I would walk along the\u003cbr\u003e long and narrow rue de Babylone, and at the end of this street, in a\u003cbr\u003e photographer’s shop window, by the dim light of a distant street lamp, the\u003cbr\u003e face of some famous writer, composed entirely of slanting planes, would\u003cbr\u003e gaze out at me; those omniscient eyes behind horn-rimmed European\u003cbr\u003e spectacles would follow me for half a block—until I crossed the glittering\u003cbr\u003e black strip of boulevard Raspail. At length, I would arrive at my pension.\u003cbr\u003e Industrious old women dressed in rags would outstrip me, tottering on\u003cbr\u003e feeble legs. Over the Seine myriad lights would burn brightly, drowning in\u003cbr\u003e the darkness, and as I watched them from a bridge, it would suddenly seem\u003cbr\u003e to me as if I were standing above a harbour and the sea were covered in\u003cbr\u003e foreign ships emblazed with lanterns. Taking one last look at the Seine, I\u003cbr\u003e would go up to my room, lie down to sleep and sink instantaneously into\u003cbr\u003e the unfathomable gloom where trembling bodies stirred, not always quite\u003cbr\u003e managing to take on the form of images familiar to my eyes and thus\u003cbr\u003e vanishing without ever having materialized. And even in sleep’s embrace I\u003cbr\u003e lamented these disappearances, sympathized with their imaginary,\u003cbr\u003e unintelligible sorrow, and so I lived and slumbered in an ineffable state,\u003cbr\u003e which I shall never understand in waking. This fact ought to have grieved\u003cbr\u003e me, but in the morning I would forget what I had seen in my dreams, and\u003cbr\u003e my abiding memory of the foregoing day would be the recollection that I\u003cbr\u003e had again missed the Métro. In the evening I would set out again for\u003cbr\u003e Claire’s. Several months previously her husband had left for Ceylon, leaving\u003cbr\u003e us alone together; and only the maid, who brought in tea and biscuits on a\u003cbr\u003e wooden tray decorated with a finely drawn image of a gaunt Chinaman, a\u003cbr\u003e woman of around forty-five who wore a pince-nez (and hence didn’t at all\u003cbr\u003e look like a servant) and who was forever lost in thought—she would\u003cbr\u003e always forget the sugar tongs, or the sugar bowl, or else a saucer or a\u003cbr\u003e spoon—only she would interrupt our ménage, coming in to ask whether\u003cbr\u003e madame needed anything. Claire, who for some reason was sure that the\u003cbr\u003e maid would be offended if she didn’t ask her for something, would say: yes,\u003cbr\u003e please bring the gramophone and some records from monsieur’s study—\u003cbr\u003e although the gramophone was quite superfluous and, once the maid had\u003cbr\u003e gone, would remain in the very spot where she had left it, while Claire\u003cbr\u003e would immediately forget all about it. The maid would come and go around\u003cbr\u003e five times during the course of an evening; and when I once remarked to\u003cbr\u003e Claire that while her maid looked remarkably well preserved for her years,\u003cbr\u003e and though her legs still possessed a positively youthful indefatigability, all\u003cbr\u003e the same, I wasn’t too sure that she was quite all there—either she had a\u003cbr\u003e mania for locomotion or else her mental faculties had just imperceptibly\u003cbr\u003e but unquestionably attenuated in connection with the onset of old age—\u003cbr\u003e Claire looked at me pityingly and replied that I should do better to exert my\u003cbr\u003e singular Russian wit on others. Besides, as she saw it, I ought to have\u003cbr\u003e remembered that only the previous day I had shown up again in a shirt\u003cbr\u003e with mismatching cufflinks, and that I couldn’t, as I had done the day before\u003cbr\u003e that, simply throw my gloves down on her bed and take her by the\u003cbr\u003e shoulders, something that wouldn’t pass for a proper greeting anywhere on\u003cbr\u003e earth, and that if she wanted to enumerate all my violations of the\u003cbr\u003e elementary rules of propriety, then she would have to go on for… at this\u003cbr\u003e point she paused in thought and said: five years. She uttered these words\u003cbr\u003e with a look of severity; I began to feel sorry that such trifles could irk her so\u003cbr\u003e and wanted to ask her forgiveness, but she turned away, her back began to\u003cbr\u003e convulse, and she raised a handkerchief to her eyes—and when at last she\u003cbr\u003e turned to look at me, I saw that she was laughing. She told me that the maid\u003cbr\u003e was seeing out the latest in a series of romantic liaisons, and that a man\u003cbr\u003e who had promised to marry her now refused bluntly. That was why she\u003cbr\u003e was so lost in thought. “What’s there to think about?” I asked. “So he’s\u003cbr\u003e refused to marry her. Does one really need so much time to grasp such a\u003cbr\u003e simple thing?”\u003cbr\u003e “You always put things much too plainly,” said Claire. “Women do.\u003cbr\u003e She’s thinking because it’s a pity for her. How is it that you can’t\u003cbr\u003e understand this?”","brand":"Pushkin Collection","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303196217573,"sku":"NP9781782276050","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781782276050.jpg?v=1767721506","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/an-evening-with-claire-isbn-9781782276050","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}