Eric Christiansen
Quartet Books have done well with Volume I of A Writer's Diary by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; 805 pages at £25 gets you to 1876, and the wild man at his worst, raving about Slav brotherhood and the eagerness of the Russian people 'to accomplish some great deed for Christ' i.e. squash everyone else. Vastly entertaining, from a safe dis- tance. But the discovery of the year was American Wives and English Husbands by Gertrude Atherton (New York 1901, but Dodd, Mead & Co had the copyright); not as clever as Edith Wharton but more fun.
La Wharton is being puffed this year; next year, perhaps she will explode. But Atherton ought to make a bit of money for some publisher meanwhile. Talking of which, Minerva have put out R. K. Narayan's The Grandmother's Tale in paperback at £5.99 which works out (per 134 pages) at one and two thirds the price of the hardback Dostoyevsky mentioned above. It would be nice to think that this reflects Mr Narayan's superiority over all the other writers now at work, rather than a mistake on a computer at Reed Con- sumer Books Ltd, who own Mandarin, who own Minerva.
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