A newly minted university graduate heads home after a long absence, to the delight and trepidation of his widowed father, who waits for hours at the station. At last, the son arrives, handsome and grown-up. The father is thrilled. But the son has brought with him a friend, a tall, brusque, fierce-looking young man. This friend is clearly the senior one in the relationship, and the two have returned from the university with all sorts of notions. They are “nihilists,” they tell the father. Their creed is to subject everything to withering scrutiny and critique. Things soon grow tense at the father’s house. At dinner and tea, where they are joined by the father’s well-dressed, old-fashioned brother, heated arguments break out. To make matters worse, the father’s estate is not flourishing. The peasants don’t like his new progressive management system. He was hoping his son would take an interest. Now he is not sure that he will.
This is the setup of Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” or, more literally but less accurately, “Fathers and Children,” in a new translation by the husband-and-wife team of Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater. The book was first published in 1862, in Russian, and the action takes place a few years earlier, in 1859, on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs and amid furious debates over the future of Russia.
Pick a memory. It could be as recent as breakfast or as distant as your first day of kindergarten. What matters is that you can really visualize it. Hold the image in your mind.
Now consider: Do you see the scene through your own eyes, as you did at the time? Or do you see yourself in it, as if you’re watching a character in a movie? Do you see it, in other words, from a first-person or a third-person perspective? Usually, we associate this kind of distinction with storytelling and fiction-writing. But like a story, every visual memory has its own implicit vantage point. All seeing is seeing from somewhere. And sometimes, in memories, that somewhere is not where you actually were at the time.
But contempt for the PSL and other items of the seasonal pumpkin spice variety is often not really about the flavor itself. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be way more furious about. (There is a shop in Scotland that serves mayonnaise ice cream, people!) Too frequently, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of savvy marketing. After all, the PSL is doing something right: It’s Starbucks’ most popular seasonal beverage, with about 424 million sold worldwide. In 2019, the chain leaned in further with the introduction of the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, finally admitting to the world that late August is still iced coffee weather.
But downing that pickle martini made me ponder this sublime ingredient, this turmeric and dill-spiked perfection, neon and glowing in all its glory. And I’ve come to the conclusion that pickle brine may just be the most glorious liquid the human race has ever engineered.
The Arctic defies categorisation. It is a staggeringly miscellaneous collection, as deep, inexhaustible and boundless as Mary Poppins’s carpetbag – although minus the magically reassuring properties – a troubling book out of which varied marvels come. Some of Don Paterson’s subjects, in this 10th collection, are vast and ungraspable – the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, the possibility of nuclear extinction. In Easter 2020, he recalls the alienating cruelty of the pandemic as a ballad, the form an innocent foil to a canny fury against government (or lack of it) – it is an ICU, not a nursery rhyme.