Manic Bookstore Cafe

Martin Handford's Waldo The other day I was visiting with some friends. Their two-year-old daughter kept busy while we chatted by examining a version of a "Where's Waldo" book. You know the type: a book of photos or pictures where there is one small element the viewer has to find, a balloon in this case, or in another case  the famous Waldo . Waldo is always there--you just have to scan the crowds, look behind tree trunks and in the windows of buildings, seek among hikers on crowded mountain trails. If you're focused enough and develop the right technique, if you train yourself and practice, you will always eventually find Waldo. The genre of this type of book guarantees success. Vladimir Nabokov famously talks about a similar phenomenon in the last paragraph of his memoir Speak, Memory : that gratifying and pleasurable moment when the thing unseen reveals itself. There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the har...

Here Chekhov looks positively cheerful, it seems to me! Chekhov gets a bum rap as being a pessimist. My favorite indictment is by Lev Shestov, a turn-of-the-20th-century philosopher, who accused the writer of "killing people's hopes and dreams." Ouch. Others have suggested that he's just depressing. I've been asked to speak on Chekhov in Finland in January (where, granted, it is very dark in the winter, and people perhaps do their best to avoid thinking depressing thoughts). I propose to lecture on the topic of Chekhov and cemeteries, and even the professor who invited me found the topic to be rather "sad." Nonetheless, I think a case can be made that Chekhov offers us ways to think about the world around us and our place in it which in fact uplift us and give us if not hope, then at least pause. (And the pause is one of Chekhov's most important dramatic tools in the plays. On that another time.) Costume sketch for Three Sisters (from ...