Review of First Love, by Turgenev
OK, so I'm an uneducated slob: get over it
In which Terry gives his opinion on one of the apparently great works of literature.
Greetings!
I thought to myself that it’s been a while since I published a book review here, so here’s one you might like. Or hate. As someone who has been reviewing books for ages, I came to the conclusion some time ago that reviewers should not just have an opinion, but have a strong opinion. So here is my strong opinion about “First Love”. And if you have any opinion about my opinion, feel free to leave a comment.
But enough of this persiflage — here’s my review.
This is the story of a boy of 15 falling in love for the first time, as related by his middle-aged self. What can I say? The language is beautiful, but in my opinion hopelessly inappropriate. The protagonist is a teenage boy, and as I was once a teenage boy I have some experience here. I can honestly say that I never met a young lad at that time who would even describe his feelings, let alone do so in such an overwrought manner.
The girl he falls in love with is an impoverished princess who is 21 going on 151. She has a bunch of suitors — aka hangers-on — all of whom drool over her and all of whom she twists around her little finger. Moreover, their characters are so under-developed that they are more or less interchangeable. At any rate, I can’t remember who was who or who did what, and I only read the book a couple of weeks ago.
I also found the denouement rather predictable. At least, I predicted it halfway through the book.
I also find the framing device rather tedious. A group of people (as far as I can tell always men) sit around and decide to tell a story. HG Wells does it in The Time Machine. Tolstoy does it in The Kreutzer Sonata2. Why not just tell the story instead of creating a story within a story? I suppose it does, in theory, allow the narrator to finish off the narrative by saying something profound or reflective about the story we’ve just “heard”3. Personally I wish the author would just get on with it.
For some reason, First Love is hailed as a great work, including by writers such as Ian McEwan and VS Pritchett, so I suppose I must be missing something. I think if you like Turgenev you might like this. But it was all too histrionic for my liking.
She reminded me of Raymond Chandler’s description of a girl in The Big Sleep: "She was a college graduate majoring in men". If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that Turgenev was guilty of “anticipatory plagiarism”, an Oulipian concept which refers to the idea that a writer in the past can be accused of plagiarizing a later writer's work, even though it would be impossible.
I reviewed The Kreutzer Sonata — just click on that link. The article has gone behind a paywall but I think there’s a 7 day free trial option.
Or maybe, speaking generally rather than about this particular novel, it’s a device that is just a little too clever and enables the author, having run out of ideas or having become bored of the whole shebang, to just end the story by saying, “We’ll never know how this panned out because the protagonist I’m writing about didn’t come back.” If I ever decide to write a novel I might use this approach myself.
Better first love book: Le Grand Meaulnes
Joseph Conrad also liked to tell a story through dialogue, i.e., a group of men sitting around while one tells a story, as if around a campfire. It bugged me when I first read his work. I forget which book it was, but it opened with standard prose, great prose, for several pages, and then switched to dialogue. I wished he hadn't done that. I was so amped after reading the opening pages that the transition was a letdown. I haven't read any Turgenev yet. He's on one of my lists. Maybe I won't read this book first.