So I managed to squeeze in one last book before the year is up 
I finished Fathers and Sons on December 30.
As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s a short book, but it works well as a short book — I didn’t feel like it should be longer at all. It predates The Bros K by about 20 years, but many of the themes are the same. (You’d think there was some kind of cultural revolution happening in Russia around that time …).
In some ways, the themes are age-old. Arkady and his friend Bazarov come back to their small home town after living and attending college in the “big city” (St. Petersburg). They have new ideas. They’re nihilists. Naturally, Arkady’s father feels out of touch, while his uncle just feels pure hatred toward Bazarov, who is Arkady’s mentor and thus is the origin of Arkady’s new nihilist ideas.
As I was reading the book early on, I wondered where the author’s sympathies would lie: with the fathers or the sons? The answer seems to be neither (though perhaps it leans a bit toward the fathers). Instead, the novel ends with Arkady’s father marrying the girl he has had a child with (a progressive idea) and with Arkady marrying a lovely girl he has met since returning home (a traditional idea). And Bazarov, the nihilist-scientist who resents the power of love, particularly in relation to himself (over the space of a month or so he falls in love twice and is rejected twice), dies after contracting typhoid from a corpse he is examining for the purpose of medical research. Though the book does not really treat Bazarov with contempt, the ending kind of speaks for itself.
I read this a few years ago on a long day of missing connections from Seattle to Virginia. Enjoyed it.