Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Like a lot of my five-star books, this one has significance to me that extends beyond the words on the page. Years ago I got to talking about books with a really beautiful bartender at the old San Francisco Brewing Company. I said how I hadn't read much of the Russians (echoing something Ezra Pound says in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I think Pound actually says Rooskies). The woman put her hands over her heart and looked to heaven: "Oh Turgenev!" she said. "Turgenev!". Obviously that tugged my interest.

A few years later I was browsing in a bookstore in Kathmandu--which is a very good book town, in case you didn't know--and found a little volume of A Hunter's Sketches. It was a very interesting edition: published in Moscow, but in English. The binding, boards and end papers were all of very high quality. There was even a little red ribbon book mark sewn in. Of course I bought it.

The book followed me up the Solo-Khumbu valley, all the way to the top of Imja-Tse, to 21,000 feet. It tagged along afterward to the Thai hill country, to Northern Australia, and stayed in my panniers on a bike trip around the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand. I dipped into the book nearly every night during that whole year-long adventure. Turgenev's stories are deep in character and setting. You can smell the spring wheat being harvested, feel the rough boards of a peasant's table under your fingers. I've never been to Russia, but on that long trip the Hunter's Sketches felt like a little bit of home, somewhere warm and inviting I could return to every night.