Parallel Lives – A Love Story from a Lost Continent by Iain Pears is not your typical love story. This gorgeously rendered historical narrative reads more like a tapestry of postwar European history, threaded with intimate recollections, art historical insight, and an enduring, improbable romance between two displaced souls. Pears, acclaimed for his cerebral historical mysteries (An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio), returns here not with fiction, but with memory—filtered through friendship, admiration, and archival devotion.
The result is a richly intimate biography of Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell—two real people Pears knew personally, whose love story transcended Cold War politics, cultural gulfs, and historical trauma. It is both an intellectual journey and an emotional excavation, bearing Pears’ signature blend of meticulous research and novelistic storytelling.
The Plot: A Twisted Path to Love
At its core, the book recounts how Larissa, a Soviet art historian from Leningrad, and Francis, an English art historian from Cambridge, met in Venice in 1962 and fell in love against the backdrop of espionage-era paranoia and bureaucratic suspicion. Their paths, detailed in parallel chapters, are nothing short of extraordinary.
Larissa’s life reads like a Tolstoyan epic: the daughter of a noble Soviet officer, she survived the Siege of Leningrad, lost a Matisse (and later “liberated” one), ran with revolutionaries, and rose to become the Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage Museum. Francis, by contrast, appears genteel—an Oxford professor and grandson of an Iraqi Jew, raised in a world of ballet critics and quiet English antisemitism. Yet beneath his polished exterior lay years of isolation, repressed sexuality, and intellectual longing.
Their eventual meeting—and immediate understanding—is presented not as a fairy-tale romance, but as a synthesis of shared sensibilities. It is not a story of rescue or escape, but of two exiles finding home in each other. Pears insists, powerfully, that it was not the Russian woman who was set free by love—but the Englishman.
Literary Style: Melancholic, Erudite, Witty
Adapting Pears’ style in this review requires acknowledging his tonal duality. He writes with the analytical clarity of a scholar and the reflective warmth of a memoirist. The prose is elegant but never opaque, punctuated by irony, particularly when recounting Larissa’s sharp, almost mischievous wit or the genteel absurdities of British academia.
Pears plays the role of both narrator and interpreter—mediating between a world that is lost and a readership that has forgotten it. His voice is humane, nostalgic, and occasionally wry, never sentimental. There are passages that read like subtle eulogies, not just for Larissa and Francis, but for an entire cosmopolitan class—polyglot, mobile, deeply cultured, and now extinct.
Themes: Culture, Identity, and the Lost European Ideal
1. Pan-Europeanism Beyond Borders
Pears paints his protagonists as citizens of a vanished Europe: one not defined by the Iron Curtain but by shared cultural inheritance—ballet, literature, art, music. Larissa and Francis feel more at ease in foreign lands than in their own countries. They are cosmopolitans, not globalists; scholars, not tourists. Their marriage is framed as the embodiment of a lost ideal—of a Europe unified not by treaties but by sensibility.
2. Art as Refuge and Mirror
Unsurprisingly for a book involving two art historians, the text brims with meditations on the role of art—as political symbol, emotional outlet, and professional anchor. Larissa’s brilliant connoisseurship, her ability to identify a Tiepolo at 100 yards, is juxtaposed with Francis’s theoretical insights. Pears doesn’t just tell us who they were; he shows us how they saw the world, through Matisse and Piranesi and Tintoretto.
3. The Politics of Identity
The book is sensitive to the complications of Jewishness, Russianness, queerness, and gender in mid-century Europe. Francis’s struggle with his identity—his discomfort with his sexuality, his outsider status as a Jew at Eton—contrasts with Larissa’s fierce patriotism and simultaneous irreverence for authority. Her loyalty to Soviet ideals is genuine, even as she breaks every rule. His Englishness is performative, even as it fails to offer belonging.
Structure: A Narrative in Counterpoint
Pears arranges their lives in alternating chapters—Larissa and Francis—until they meet. This dual-biography format works brilliantly. Each life story illuminates the other: the siege of Leningrad gains resonance when viewed beside the English class system; Francis’s diaries, sharp with self-reproach and irony, counterbalance Larissa’s oral history, mischievous and elliptical.
After their 1962 meeting in Venice, the stories converge into a joint chronicle. The moment they meet—over lunch in a shabby Venetian trattoria—is understated but electric. It’s not just a turning point in their lives, but in the tone of the book, which shifts from individual histories to shared legacy.
Critique: Where the Book Falters
Though Parallel Lives by Iain Pears is masterfully written, it is not a page-turner in the traditional sense. The pacing is reflective, meandering, and often weighed down by historical detail—fascinating for some readers, exhausting for others.
Potential Weaknesses:
- Density of historical context: At times, the reader may feel more like a student than a participant. Pears presumes a certain familiarity with Soviet and postwar European history, which may be daunting for casual readers.
- Fragmented emotional core: Because the couple doesn’t meet until nearly two-thirds through the book, the “love story” part feels like a denouement rather than a climax. This structural choice, while intellectually justified, may leave romantics underwhelmed.
- Selective memory: Pears is clear that he is reconstructing memory from both oral histories (Larissa’s interviews) and archival material (Francis’s diaries). But Larissa’s omissions—particularly about her first marriage—are significant. Pears is charmingly self-aware about this, but some readers may wish for a more comprehensive internal portrait.
Similar Books and Author’s Previous Works
While this is Pears’ most personal work to date, readers familiar with his fiction will recognize the thematic continuity. An Instance of the Fingerpost and Stone’s Fall both blend academic investigation with historical intrigue. However, Parallel Lives by Iain Pears trades mystery for memory, and fiction for biography.
For readers who enjoyed:
- Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat (for its portrait of European intellectual life)
- Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (for its nostalgic humanism)
- Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul (for its melancholy love for a lost city)
this book will resonate deeply.
Final Thoughts: A Story of Love, Yes—But Also of Loss
In a world saturated with formulaic love stories and over-filtered nostalgia, Parallel Lives by Iain Pears stands apart. It is honest, eccentric, erudite. It is a love story that is not about passion, but recognition. About the invisible lines of class, history, and geography that form our identities—and how rare it is to find someone who sees the world as you do.
Larissa and Francis lived their lives in defiance of the categories they were born into. They were both insiders who never belonged. In that sense, Pears gives us not just a love story, but a portrait of a generation.
This book is a fitting tribute to them—and to a lost continent of ideas, aesthetics, and quiet courage.
