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by Iain Pears (Author)
Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.
Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats' tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. Parallel Lives is the story of how these two star-crossed lovers met, instantly understand each other, and were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together.
Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, and after the war rose to become the youngest commissar in the Soviet Union and keeper of Italian drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor's corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole ("I didn't steal it. I liberated it") a Matisse from the Italian government. Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King's College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting, and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal.
Iain Pears, who was neighbors with Larissa and Francis in Oxford, knew both his principal characters well. In telling Larissa and Francis's love story, he is also capturing the Europe of a bygone era: a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.
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Praise for Iain Pears
The Dream of Scipio
"A thrilling journey through history, into the human heart and soul."
-- Geraldine Brooks, Washington Post
"[Iain Pears] invests his complex story with piquancy, irony, and humor. There is much to ponder here, from Neoplatonic philosophy to anti-Semitism to public duty. . . . Eye-opening."
-- People
"A multilayered tale of moral choice, love, danger and loss."
-- John Crowley, New York Times Book Review
"An adventure and achievement."
-- San Francisco Chronicle
"A dazzling triptych of love and ideas . . . Pears leaves us with a dream, not only of destruction, but of immense and unexpected heroism."
-- Boston Globe
Strone's Fall
"Pears is a bold storyteller with ambitions beyond the confines of genre."
-- Clare Clark, Guardian
"Mr. Pears's assured command of period history, language, lore, and attitudes is formidable."
-- Wall Street Journal
"[Pear's novels are] entertainment in the best sense: thrilling, compelling, ambitious and smart."
-- Carmela Ciuraru, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Arcadia
"[Iain Pears] is a great writer of ideas and intellectual adventure."
-- Scott Bradfield, New York Times Book Review
"The most striking thing about Pears's writing--his plots and ideas are complex, but his style is simple and clear. . . . Fantastic fun."
-- Bryan Applebaum, Sunday Times (UK)
