Bobbery 
James Wood
- Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon
It is in some ways unfortunate that Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin to music, not Rossini, the composer of deep shallows. Pushkin, according to T.J. Binyon’s remarkable biography, became ‘addicted’ to Rossini while living in Odessa, where an Italian opera company was visiting, and though Binyon makes nothing of it, it rather blares at us, as writers’ tastes in music so often do (Joyce’s love of Puccini, for instance, or Auden’s dislike of Brahms).
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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
A Frog’s Life · Coetzee’s Confessions
The Lie-World · D.B.C. Pierre
Gossip in Gilt · John Updike’s Licks of Love
At the tent flap sin crouches · The Fleshpots of Egypt
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
Credulity · ‘Life of Pi’
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory · David Bezmozgis
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