Errand

This is a dry story of the death of Anton Chekov, told in a biographical mode, though presumably with fictional elements. Chekov himself is a distant, half-ascended character, and the effects of his last days are seen instead in other people: his sister Maria, Leo Tolstoy, a German doctor, his wife Olga, and a young waiter.

I was conscious of skill and control in the prose, but I couldn’t engage with the story at all. My guess is that it’s allusive and aimed at 1988, or at Chekov experts. Without any helpful context like that, it comes across as a classic “literary work” in the negative sense: a sequence of non-dramatic events, written with skill, placing mysterious emphasis on mundane objects and occurrences, culminating in a non-ending.