Home of the Gentry

Reading Turgenev was a book by William Trevor as well as still being a good idea. There is a line of prose writers that came before Trevor, including the Joyce of Dubliners and George Moore that make for a highly coherent reading list.

Home of the Gentry, or whichever of its many titles in translation, is as important as Rudin or Fathers and Sons, it seems to me, to Turgenev's depiction of the 'superfluous man', which we might uncharitably understand as 'layabout', as Mikhalevich lets Lavretsky know,

'You're not a sceptic, not disillusioned, not a Voltairean, you're a layabout, a vicious layabout, not a naive type. Naive layabouts lie on the stove and do nothing, because they don't know how to do anything; and they don't think, but you're a thinking man - and yet you lie around; you could do something and yet you do nothing; you lie with your full stomach sticking up in the air and say: This is how it must be, lying about like this, because no matter what people do, everything's nonsense, it's a lot of rubbish leading to nothing.'

So that's him told and it might make others among us feel a bit uneasy, too.

Lavretsky marries the chic, talented but possibly superficial Varvara with all her Parisian sophistication but she proves less than a perfect match. Returning home, he finds Liza who is a much better idea but, as so many such triangles prove, no lasting good comes of it all. Liza becomes a nun, Varvara carries on with her glamorous society life and Lavretsky is superfluous.

In the usual process of evaluating things, it is ultimately necessary to compare them with others which unavoidably leads us towards the unnecessary dreariness of league tables. I'm not going to rate Turgenev as Top 10 or any other such reductive statistical status, not least because there could easily be twenty novelists I'd like to put in a Top 10 but I'd say he's essential and anybody one rates alongside or above him needs to be very good indeed.

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The arrival of that book delayed a big hiatus in which I trawl through writers wondering what should come next. It shouldn't be like that, though, I rely on things demanding to be read. Similarly, I can't like some people sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and produce a poem worth having. The poem has to insist on being written.

And so I await the arrival of the Grove Beethoven, not least for its catalogue of opus numbers. He was a teenage hero before being eclipsed by Bach, and Handel, with Mozart, the first love, never going away. But, following that performance of the Ghost Trio, it has been a Beethoven revival summer and he's in there challenging Mozart and Handel and only likely to improve his credentials after the Yo Yo Ma, Emmanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos Prom on Saturday. The point being that such a trio performing the Archduke really should make any anorak attempt to make league tables look very silly. However, come December I'm sure I'll be sitting here trying to decide which from a highly competitive list qualifies as the Event of the Year.