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In response to
"mafic, if you are around, could I get a c/p on an Economist article? TIA -- (link)"
by
crash davis 😺
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well I can't let David steal my thunder.
Posted by
mafic
Oct 22 '24, 18:48
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Six novels you can read in a day
Reluctant to start on a big masterpiece? Try these small gems instead
Reading, circa 1890. Artist Georges Croegaert. A painting of a lady, lounging and reading a book.
Photograph: Getty Images
Aug 9th 2024
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FOR A SMALL format the novella carries a lot of baggage—starting with its diminutive. It has long been seen as the middle child of the literary world: it is neither the fully fledged novel, nor the fussed-over baby of the literary family, the short story. Presented with a work of between 60 and 160 pages, agents and editors typically tell an author to scale up or pare back. Melville House, an independent publisher in New York that prides itself on publishing novellas, calls them a “renegade art form”.
In its economy and audacity, an exceptional novella comes close to poetry. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. You can read one in the time it takes to watch a play or a film, then rise from your chair with the exhilaration of having finished a work in one sitting. Zipping through several novellas can cultivate a reading habit. Many of the greatest authors have written at least one: James Joyce (“The Dead”), Ernest Hemingway (“The Old Man and the Sea”), Mary Shelley (“Mathilda”) and Leo Tolstoy (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich”), to name just a few. Here are six short novels that may enchant you.
Small Things Like These. By Claire Keegan. Grove Atlantic; 128 pages; $20. Faber & Faber; £12.99
A hard-working coal merchant with a tidy life stumbles upon a scandal, and finds a deep, unstoppable need to do what is right. There is nothing easy about that: Bill Furlong must set aside his wife’s pleas and the warnings of villagers—well-intentioned yet also complicit—who urge him to ignore what he saw in the coal shed of a convent. He knows that his actions will hurt his daughters’ prospects for an education. “Once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home.” Furlong does not—finds he cannot—give in to it. The book’s gorgeous use of symbolism is reminiscent at times of a fairytale: crows roost around the convent, strutting and cawing ominously. But the crime it depicts is all too real, rooted in the history of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland run by the Roman Catholic Church. “Small Things Like These” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, the shortest novel so far to gain that distinction.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? By Lorrie Moore. Knopf; 160 pages; $16. Faber & Faber; £9.99
Lorrie Moore’s book captures female adolescence and the intensity of its friendships. Berie, its adult narrator, tries to understand how, after the exuberance and small, wild joys of her teenage years, her life has become so staid and unfulfilling. She recounts a summer spent working at Storyland, a theme park, with her best friend, Sils: “She was my hero, and had been for almost as long as I could remember”. Their days are punctuated by cigarette breaks and jokes; they mock the small-town theme park and its tacky rides. But suddenly they must make a decision that is all too adult. It marks the beginning of the splintering of their friendship: one stays in their hometown, Horsehearts, the other leaves. Looking back, Berie sees the mockery and rebellion that the girls so enjoyed as callow answers to teenage insecurities. Yet her account vibrates with regret for what she has lost. Sils, for a magical while, had helped “keep the busy, roaring strange-tongued world at bay”. Moore’s writing is as luscious and funny as ever.
Open Water. By Caleb Azumah Nelson. Grove Atlantic; 160 pages; $16. Penguin; £9.99
The debut of a British-Ghanaian novelist published in 2021, “Open Water” is a love story that is equal parts graceful, defiant and mournful. The characters are two black British artists living in south-east London, whose blossoming love for each other is tested over the course of a year by racial injustice. Trauma and intimacy are central themes: the narrator must allow himself to soften into love, and work hard to stay there. “Seeing people”, he reflects, “is no small task.” The narrator, who addresses himself as “you” throughout the book, goes unnamed, as does the woman he loves. They share a deep admiration for many of the same black artists, among them Frank Ocean, Zadie Smith and Barry Jenkins, whose creations are referred to throughout the book. Read this while listening to the Spotify playlist that Caleb Azumah Nelson compiled for it.
Bonjour Tristesse. By Françoise Sagan. Translated by Heather Lloyd. Penguin; 112 pages; £9.99
This coming-of-age classic was a sensation when it came out in 1954. Françoise Sagan was just 18 years old. The novel takes place over the course of a summer in the south of France. Cécile, its 17-year-old narrator, spends languorous days at a secluded seaside villa in the company of her father, a philandering widower whom she adores and whose hedonism she emulates, and his latest mistress. When he begins a more serious romance with an old acquaintance, Cécile does everything she can to stop him from marrying, with tragic results. Cécile’s own heady romance—breezy sex with an earnest boy whom she later drops—and her existentialist musings shocked early readers. Questions of freedom, responsibility and how to lead a meaningful life were central to French philosophical thought of the 1950s. The novella’s opening lament is classic Sagan, and probably defined French ennui for a generation: “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow.”
Foe. By J.M. Coetzee. Penguin; 160 pages; $16 and £8.99
This is a beautifully imaginative retelling of Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a woman cast away during a mutiny on a ship. She washes up on the desert island where Cruso (he loses the final “e” in J.M. Coetzee’s novel) and his companion, Friday, have lived for years. In this subversive retelling, Cruso is decidedly unheroic: taciturn, complacent and uninterested in improving his life on the island. Most of the story is told in a series of letters Barton writes after her rescue to Daniel Foe, a novelist. She asks him to help transform her account into a bestselling work of fiction—for in Mr Coetzee’s reimagining, this is her story, not Cruso’s. “Foe” explores the tension between truth and storytelling, and what an author owes to those who inspire him. It is also a woman’s reckoning with losing her power to express herself. But nowhere is that muting clearer, or more thorough, than in the person of Friday, here a black former slave who, for reasons that cannot be known for sure, is tongueless. He cannot even begin to tell his own story.
Masks. By Enchi Fumiko. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Vintage; 144 pages; $16.95 and £8.99
Among the few of Enchi Fumiko’s novels to be translated into English, in 1983, this may also be her finest. Enchi began her career as a playwright before writing fiction, for which she received little recognition until the 1950s, when “Masks” was published. It is a stone-cold story of deception, set against the backdrop of the spellbinding masks and ornate robes of traditional noh theatre. It tells the story of Mieko and her complex plot to exact revenge, for infidelity and more, on her dead husband, by manipulating the relationships between her widowed daughter-in-law and two friends who love her. Its main themes—sexual deceit, thwarted desire and the awful power of resentment—offer a reflection on the position of women in Japan at the time Enchi was writing. They also reveal her interest in spirit possession and her fascination with the powerful role of the female shaman. Although some familiarity with “The Tale of Genji” (whose 1,000-odd pages Enchi translated into modern Japanese) will enrich the reading, lack of it is no barrier to enjoying this novel in all its haunting, elegant cruelty.
Try also
If you want to stick to fiction, try Jhumpa Lahiri’s short novel, “Whereabouts”. In our appraisal in 2021 we wrote that she had taken risks for her craft that paid off beautifully. Enjoyed “Open Water”? Pick up “Small Worlds”, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s second novel, published last year: our reviewer thought it took fewer stylistic risks than his first, but told a story that has “more scope and emotional heft”. If you’re looking for non-fiction books you can read in a day, here are six to get you started. Explore our interactive article that gives estimates of how long it would take to read each of the 500 “greatest books of all time”.â–
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