Lucas Shiller
Book Review
A review of Rebecca Ruth Gould’s Strangers (Serving House Books). Purchase the collection directly from the publisher here.
There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.
Chekhov, Anton. Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: 2000. p. 365.
In this strange scene from Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog,” the first thing old Dmitri Gurov does after consummating his illicit affair with the younger, but equally married Anna Sergeyevna, is reach for a slice of watermelon. This single act externalizes the gulf between two lives. The lovers shared a moment, but experienced it in vastly different ways: Anna cries, Dmitri munches away.
This sense of estrangement, especially from those we love, is at the heart of Rebecca Ruth Gould’s first collection of stories, Strangers, published in December 2025. Gould, a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics at SOAS University of London, has followed her interests far from her hometown of Springfield, Illinois, living in cities spanning Berkeley to Budapest, Damascus to Tbilisi. It’s fitting, then, that an author who has lived her life abroad should be so focused on strangeness and the stranger.
Gould’s collection of stories is more theme and variations than suite or sonata. From story to story, recurring elements drawn from a life on the move pile up, fall apart, and re-concatenate. In most of the stories the reader follows a lonely traveling scholar, Teresa, as she comes to terms with unknown foods, foreign languages and unfamiliar ways of loving. Each time Teresa falls for a new man in a new city, we catch a fresh glimpse of a character who seems to follow in the author’s footsteps.
As a professor of literature, Gould has given careful thought to how her stories will be received and offers up some explanation in her introduction “Of Places and People: On Writing”. Here she addresses the author-character question directly: Rebecca is not in fact Teresa, nor could she be; rather, the author hopes to strike the same fruitful balance between familiarity and distance that Anton Chekhov often did, for example in his “Lady with the Little Dog”.
In this story Chekhov juxtaposes the humdrum and respectable family life of Dmitri Gurov with his passionate affair with Anna Sergeyevna, whom he met while on vacation in Yalta. Chekhov examines the two facets of each character, but offers no resolution to the parallel lives, coexisting but never to be reconciled. After their encounter Dmitri and Anna are just as lost as when they met.
“Lady with the Little Dog” was clearly on Gould’s mind when writing one of the strongest stories in the collection, “The Breakdown of Love”. In it, Teresa, now a widow, travels to Paris from her academic post in the UK to meet the recently divorced Demetrious, a bureaucrat working for the EU. The two bond over movies, food and books while skirting the Seine. Only when she accompanies him home to Brussels does a certain distance emerge between them.
After they had catalogued all the novels, plays, and short stories they had ever read, she asked him about the poets. “Aren’t there any poets you love to read?” she said. “About poetry, you will have to teach me,” he answered. “It’s a mystery to me why people devote themselves so intensely to this art. Poetry is like gardening. It doesn’t do any harm. But what good does it do? Who needs it?”
[…]
Words were her life, and poetry her sustenance. She felt a twinge of pain as he spoke, as if when he trivialized poetry he also trivialized her. But her discontent soon became submerged with other emotions as they indulged their shared passions.
This gap between them, opened subtly yet irrevocably, eventually grows to a gulf. They have a falling out. While all was well in the vacation world of Paris, tensions emerge when they enter each other’s domestic sphere. A different, more violent side of Demitrious emerges. After a miserable visit to the theater (they go to see Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya) Teresa is reminded of other works by Chekhov. Reading “The Lady with the Little Dog” becomes her way of coping with this new disappointment, of breaking down their love. Their ill-fated relationship, incipient as it was, has reached its end.
As Teresa resumes her quotidian existence in the UK, even the disembodied sounds of London’s cityscape take on significance, commenting on the rift between her and her lovers:
Mind the gap, said the recorded voice on the train as they approached Trafalgar Square. She stood up to change trains.
Whereas Dmitri and Anna can have no contact with one another after their affair in Yalta, thus allowing fantasy to run wild, Demetrious and Teresa live in a different, hyper-connected world; one with fewer social strictures, but with its own methods of producing distance. Constant and disappointing phone conversations after the first meeting in Paris create their own special kind of disillusionment and contribute to the downfall of their relationship. In “The Lady with the Little Dog” the two lovers navigate their dueling, irreconcilable lives, but in “The Breakdown of Love” the juxtaposition isn’t so much between the interior and the exterior, but between the past and the present. Divorcés and widows struggle just as much against those they have lost as the lover across the table.
Gould’s insight, communicated differently in each of the nine stories, is that a stranger isn’t just someone you haven’t met. Ultimately Anna Sergeyevna and Dmitri, Demetrious and Teresa, remain entities just as unknown to each other, despite their trysts abroad and tristesse at home, as to their spouses. As Gould puts it,
One thing all of the characters have in common, and which I have in common with them as their creator and as a human being, is that they are strangers to each other, and to themselves.
If we can only come so close to those we love, we are left to mind the gap.
Strangers
Rebecca Ruth Gould
Serving House Books
166pp
$13
Lucas Shiller is a U.S. American writer, editor, and translator based in Berlin. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Opiate and Ferrars & Fields, and his theatrical work has been featured at the European Capital of Culture Festival in Chemnitz. He is a fiction editor and literary translator, working with The Baltic Sea Library and other projects. He holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Freie Universität Berlin and is completing an M.A. in European Literatures at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
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