Primeiro Amor (Em Portugues do Brasil) (original 1860; edition 2015)

A little bloodless for "first love." Maybe this is a dude thing--competing with (and losing to) your father for sexual attention. Left me pretty unmoved. ( )

This novella gives an excellent chronicle of the pangs of first love, not just the romantic fever but also the way teenagers wobble between child and adult. ( )

I had heard that Russian speakers regard Turgenev as superior to Tolstoy, as a prose stylist. Since I do not read Russian, I could only test this via translation. This particular work, in English, is a poor substitute. The translation reads as an academic one, seeming to favor fidelity over fluency. So I can't tell, even indirectly, if Turgenev is great or not.

There are, however, certainly moments of greatness here, where perhaps the original beauty can shine through, the sun behind the clouds. This bit was my favorite:
'And what has come to pass of all I hoped for? And now, when the shades of evening begin to steal over my life, what have I left fresher, more precious, than the memories of the storm -- so soon over -- of early morning, of spring?'
It's a short book, worth reading, just for that. ( )

Late evening after dinner, three middle-aged men remember their first love. For two of them the experience had no noteworthy aspects, but the third gave an account of his passion for an "older" woman when he was sixteen. As the daughter of a coarse, impoverished princess she had several admirers when mother and daughter moved next door to Petrovich. He was immediately smitten. Nothing has changed for lovelorn teenagers in the almost two hundred years since this story was written, they are still beyond help or advice, with no choice but to wait and see what happens. Beautifully written with an excellent translation by Isaiah Berlin, this slim book is well worth reading. ( )

Another Melville House novella I'd never heard of but bought mostly just because of the Melville House endorsement. I had very little in the way of expectations going in, but the book still managed to surprise me. Rather than being about a "first love" where two young people are breathlessly in love with each other, it's about that kind of "first love" that is an unrequited romantic obsession with an inscrutable other.

With its themes of decaying Russian aristocracy, I expected this little tale to be far more tragic than it was. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly squalor, cynicism, and heartbreak here. But somehow it all felt on a more ordinary, human scale, rather than epic, and I think I liked it better for that.

Another excellent Melville House pick. ( )