In September 1971, the American writer George Feifer lent an advance copy of his novel The Girl From Petrovka to an impatient friend. The copy was unique: red marks on most pages, “labour” corrected to “labor” throughout, the scars of re-Americanising proofs that had mangled his English edition. Within a week the friend had lost it from his car in Bayswater. Searches and rewards failed. Feifer later called it an oddly painful experience – as if the loss had jinxed the book.
The bench
Two summers later Anthony Hopkins signed to play Kostya in the film of Feifer’s novel. He went to central London to buy the book and found nothing – not on Charing Cross Road, not anywhere. Heading home empty-handed, he noticed an abandoned book on a bench at Leicester Square tube station. It was The Girl From Petrovka, marked up in red throughout. Puzzled less by the luck than by the annotations, he took it home and prepared the part from it.
In November 1973 Feifer travelled to Vienna, where the film was shooting, and met his leading man. Talk turned to the book, and Feifer confessed he no longer owned a single copy of his own novel – the annotated one had vanished in London two years before. Hopkins fetched his bench copy. Was this, with the notes scribbled in the margins, the lost one? It was: Feifer recognised his hand, his marks, his labour-to-labor campaign. Twenty-six months after Bayswater, the unique copy was home.
What to do with it
Hopkins has told the story ever since – on talk shows, in interviews about fate – and Jungians have claimed it for synchronicity: the meaningful coincidence that behaves like an answer. Skeptics exist, as they should; one London history site files the tale under “dubious”. But the primary source here is unusually good, because it is the loser himself: Feifer’s detailed account names the month, the street, the marks on the pages. A minimalist reading survives even without the universe winking: the friend was recently around Leicester Square, the book waited a short while, Hopkins arrived at the right hour. Luck, plus London’s density, plus twenty-six months of patience.
And yet the minimalist reading leaves something unfelt. Hopkins needed exactly that book, in exactly that annotated state, at exactly the moment he stopped searching – and the man who needed it back got it from the one reader in eight million who would recognise what it was. Call it statistics with a sense of occasion. Or admit, with Hopkins, that some books find their readers, and some stories are meant to be told.
