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Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice Munro “Leaving Maverley” was originally published in the November 28, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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Even in retirement, Alice Munro remains prolific. This is her third short story to appear in The New Yorker this year. If we throw in October 2010, it is her fourth in a short time. Before that, her most recent story in the magazine was December of 2008, a year when she publisehd four in the magazine.
One thing I enjoy about Munro’s stories is how detailed she can be while covering a vast amount of time in a short space. “Leaving Maverley” was no exception. The story begins with a fairly detailed column about an old movie theater named the Capital, “as such theatres often were.” We learn about Morgan Holly, the owner, and how upset he was when his single employee told he she had to quite because she was going to have a baby. Here is the detail I’m talking about:
He might have expected this — she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show — but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.
Those details — the pregnancy and how “those days” dealt with such matters, the private life, change — are important. But, interestingly, though the story is set up in a way that we might expect it, Morgan Holly and this employee are not particularly important to this story.
The newly pregnant employee has a recommendation for a replacement named Leah, a quiet girl Morgan quite liked because he didn’t want someone gabbing with the customers. Further, due to her strict father’s command, she was not allowed to watch (or hear) the movies, so Morgan was even happier because that meant less distractions. The one problem with this employment is that Leah’s father would not allow her to walk home alone so late on a Saturday night. The solution: the local police officer, Ray Elliot, “who often broke his rounds to watch a little of the movie,” would walk her home those weekend nights.
After a section break, Munro proceeds to give us Ray Elliot’s back story. A veteran, “[h]e came home with a vague idea that he had to do something meaningful with the life that had so inexplicably been left to him, but he didn’t know what.” At school, he met Isabel, his teacher, who was married and thirty years old. She’s beautiful and Ray’s fellow classmates often jest in private that “some guyes got all the luck.” Here is how economically Munro develops Ray and Isabel’s relationship:
Ray disliked hearing that kind of talk, and the reason was that he had fallen in love with her. And she with him, which seemed infinitely more surprising. Itw as preposterous to everybody except themselves. There was a divorce — a scandal to her well-connected family and a shock to her husband, who had wanted to marry her since they were children. Ray had an easier time of it than she did, because he had little family to speak of, and those he did have announced that they supposed they wouldn’t be good enough for him now that he was marrying so high up, and they would just stay out of his way in the future. If they expected any denial or reassurance in response to this, they did not get it.
The story circles back to Leah in the most peculiar way. It turns out that Isabel has a disease and is unable to have children. She and Ray never talked about whether they were disappointed by this, but Ray wonders if disappointment weren’t in some way connected to the fact that Isabel wanted to hear all about Leah, the girl Ray walked home on Saturday nights.
I don’t really want to go on here because the story is filled with twists and turns as Ray, Isabel, and Leah live out their lives, for better or for worse. There is a lot of disappointment, more betrayal, more pregnancies, more loss, and in the end we are left with an incredibly deep portrait of a few complex relationships, and I don’t believe anything turns out as we might predict, though it seems very true to life.
All this in just a few pages, where the pace is swift, matching the inexplicably sudden passing of life. Yet, despite the brevity, there is enough detail, often in just a phrase, that we can imagine volumes about even the side relationships, like the one between Isabel and her first husband — really all we know is that he was a veteran himself and he had wanted to marry Isabel since they were children, yet how much that says.
After the success of Joan Didion’s 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking, it is unlikely people don’t know the tragic event that became the cause of writing that book: the death of Didion’s husband on the evening of December 30, 2003, after the couple had visited their adopted daughter, Quintana, who, days before the death, was hospitalized for pneumonia and developed septic shock. She was unconscious when her father died. Didion wrote the book in the fall of the following year, and Quintana was still hospitalized. Sadly, Quintana died in August of 2005. In Blue Nights (2011) Didion revisits grief, this time for a child.
Review copy courtesy of Knopf.
The opening of the book took me immediately to one of my favorite pieces of fiction to appear in The New Yorker this year: Steven Millhauser’s “Getting Closer” (my thoughts here). In that story, a young boy’s family is taking an outing to a river on a beautiful summer day, something the boy looks forward to every year. As he’s going to the river, he stops. He doesn’t want to get in because the moment is too precious. He knows that if he gets in it’s the beginning of the end. This sad thought becomes terrifying when the young boy realizes this applies to his whole life — it’s already speeding on its way out.
While Blue Nights is structured around the untimely death of Quintana at 39, it is universal because what Didion is really talking about is mortality. She says, “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children” — an acute line that struck me hard because we don’t want to acknowledge this – but this is a two-way street. Maybe she didn’t realize it (certainly didn’t acknowledge it) at the time, but everything — all the promise of more, of health, of life, of love — was leading to an end. As Didion has become older and more frail, she knows her own end is coming too.
The title is explained at the book’s opening. The blue nights are those lovely summer nights in New York that seem not to end. Darkness comes so slowly that there is a pause between day and night when everything is blue.
During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.
It’s not necessarily the most original thought, this seasonal metaphor for mortality, but what makes this book worth reading is Didion’s directness and precision. Here, for example, she just tells us what she’s getting at:
This book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwinding of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.
After this little introduction, we step back to Quintana’s wedding day in 2003 (just months before she was hospitalized). It is a day that promises a beginning, not an end, but Didion doesn’t let the ending out of sight, showing how such “beginnings” are taken for granted.
As the book moves on, it seems Didion is working around something, which is a bit opposite what I said above when I praised her for being direct. She begins to broach on the subject of her daughter’s death and then turns away to look at something else, perhaps even someone else’s death. Still, she is direct because she acknowledges this tendency to veer away, causing the book to feel looser than it actually is. Even as the book seemingly progresses loosely, Didion ratchets it back into its tight structure with the repetition of multiple phrases and tropes.
As was the case with The Year of Magical Thinking, I really enjoyed reading this. It is poignant, in part because of the specificity and seeming distance of the writer which to me feels more like a numbness (it’s clear the feeling is there). I’m not always a huge fan of such books, though, because they are incredibly intimate, but again Didion has written something close to the heart and without bathos.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Sam Lipsyte’s “The Climber Room” was originally published in the November 21, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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I’m just not becoming a fan of Sam Lipsyte’s work. I have not read one of his novels, but the more I read his short stories the less I feel like this is a gap worth filling. I did enjoy – though not fully — the first piece of his I read, “The Dungeon Master,” published last year in The New Yorker (my thoughts here). But since then, it has gone down hill. I didn’t like ”The Worm in Philly,” a short piece he published in the Fall 2010 issue of The Paris Review, and I really didn’t like “Deniers,” which was published in The New Yorker earlier this year (my thoughts here). And now I find “The Climber Room” my least favorite of all, though I recognize that it could be the accumulated force of the last disappointments.
For me, Lipsyte has a vivid “voice” or style that sounds slightly irreverent and hip. The stories move forward nicely, but I can never fully believe that what he’s saying comes from anything more than his desire to keep that slightly irreverent and hip tone — in other words, to me he injects a lot into his stories simply to shock the reader. I say simply to shock because shock with purpose can be powerful, but I’ve never been fully convinced of real purpose.
“The Climber Room” is about Tovah Gold, a woman just creeping upon middle-age. She is just beginning a new job in a preschool. Soon after the story begins, Tovah meets one of the older fathers (“a skinny, gray-haired man in a polo shirt, old enough to be the grandfather of the girl who called him “Papa!”). When the man introduces himself, Tovah thinks he says his name is “Randy Goat.” Yes, she misheard him, and that little joke alone was okay, I guess, but combine the misheard name with the rest of the story and it is a blatant stunt that, for me, kept the story over-the-top.
Tovah is disappointed with her life. She was once a promising poet, but she hasn’t been able to do anything there for quite a while, not since the days when she could freely eat loads of greasy food. That night, after meeting the Goat Man (as she calls Randy Goat, whose real name is Gautier), she collapses into a mess of foods again.
Now she was thirty-six and in one eating spree had become a vile sack of fat and rot. In this vision of herself she was not even obese but more like a bloated corpse gaffed from a lake. There on the couch, her belly flopped over her jeans, the new chin she’d acquired in about five hours was damp and rashy, and rank scents curled from her pores and, especially, from her crotch whenever she tugged at her waistband to ease the ache. It was all so awful, so evil, so unlike the Tovah of recent years, of modified appetites and reduced expectations, that her corpse-body surged with something revoltingly, smearishly pleasing. She felt slimy, garbage-juice sexy. Her hand jerked inside her underwear for relief. She pictured the actual gaffer leaning over the side of the fishing boat: tan and rugged, with kind, lustful eyes under a brocaded cap. Sparkle eyes. Tovah’s legal pad, upon which she’d written only the title of her poem, “Needing the Wood,” slide to the carpet. Her fountain pen, caught against an embroidered yellow pillow, impaled it.
This episode where we get an inside take on Tovah’s sexual fantasy with a gaffer pulling her bloated corpse out of the lake gives a good idea of what I’m talking about. Yes, in a way, this episode tells a lot about Tovah’s mindset and foreshadows some of the means she’s willing to take to fulfill her desire which is increasingly becoming an obsession: she really would like to have a child: “A baby, however, especially a baby bred to be lean and coal-haired and jade-eyed and slant-smiled, like Sean, could learn to express Tovah’s feelings, too, without the torture of words.” Yes, as the story moves along, achieving this desire involves The Goat Man.
It isn’t that I found this all disgusting and therefore somehow unworthy of fiction. It’s that the story uses these images in place of nuance. I suppose that my basic problem with Lipsyte is the same I have with many a showy writer. We often hear praises sung to a writer who can write beautifully, though underneath the beautiful phrase is an empty thought. The same thing can happen when someone writes ugliness. The audience can see an ugly image and mistake it for profundity — why else would it be there? I won’t give it away, but Exhibit A of an empty thought covered with false ugly profundity is the final few paragraphs.
KevinfromCanada has often likened his developing feelings toward a book, whether good or bad, to a tree falling. At first, slight movements may sway the tree from “I like this” to “I hate this” and back again. But as the tree begins to fall, the more force required to right that tree again. Thus, if we are really starting to enjoy a book, it’s going to have to do something pretty horrendous to force the tree in the other direction. The same if we are hating a book. The same with an author. I haven’t read a lot of Lipsyte, but the tree is falling fast to the “I hate this” side. Because of that, I realize that my thoughts on this particular story may be a bit tainted because the tree was already falling even before I picked it up. This was clear to me immediately as I wasn’t far into ”The Climbing Room” before I was focusing on all of the annoying excesses, possibly to the exclusion of anything redemptive that would cast those excesses in better light. Saying all of this, I’m not apologizing for my feelings here, but I do recommend taking my opinion with a grain of salt, as always.
Tonight the winners of the 2011 National Book Awards were announced.
Fiction: Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward
Nonfiction: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt
Poetry: Head Off and Split, by Nikky Finney
Young Peoples’ Literature: Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai
Despite the fact that I was initially uninterested, I actually did acquire all but one of the fiction finalists after looking into them further. The one I did not pick up: Salvage the Bones. I will, though, someday.
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Steven Millhauser’s “Miracle Polish” was originally published in the November 14, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
Click for a larger image.
It’s always a good week when Steven Millhauser is in The New Yorker. I actually read this piece on Monday but then was out of the country on a business trip, so only now am I able to write a bit about it. I’m anxious for your thoughts.
First things: I love Millhauser’s writing. This, for me, was not his best story by a long ways, but it’s still well written with a great eye for detail and rhythm.
The story begins with the narrator regretting that he let a rather worn stranger sell him some “Miracle Polish”: “It cleaned mirrors with one easy flick of the wrist.” The stranger is a bit surprised when this middle-class man buys the polish, but he is happy about it. Nevertheless, his mannerisms suggest something amiss:
“You’ve made a wise choice,” he said solemnly, glancing at me and looking abruptly away.
The narrator, having no intention of using the polish, put it away for a while. Then, one morning while checking his suit before a mirror, he noticed a smudge. It’s probably been there for a long time, but now that he has some polish . . .
It surprises him that the spot disappears so easily. Also surprising is the fact that now the rest of the mirror looks blemished, so he decides to polish the whole thing. Stepping back to examine the mirror, he sees himself reflected nicely in the mirror:
But it was more than that. There was a freshness to my image, a kind of mild glow that I had never seen before. I looked at myself with interest. This in itself was striking, for I wasn’t the kind of man who looked at himself in mirrors. I was the kind of man who spent as little time as possible in front of mirrors, the kind of man who had a brisk and practical relation to his reflection, with its tired eyes, its disappointed shoulders, its look of defeat. Now I was standing before a man who resembled my old reflection almost exactly but who had been changed in some manner, the way a lawn under a cloudy sky changes when the sun comes out. What I saw was a man who had something to look forward to, a man who expected things of life.
Filling his house with mirrors, the man is invigorated. He’s thrilled when he shows the mirrors to his almost-girlfriend Monica (“For years we had edged toward each other without moving all the way.”), who, like the narrator has never been particularly attractive, and whose reflection doesn’t change per se, and yet it does:
I had hoped the reflection in the polished mirror would please her in some way, but I hadn’t expected what I saw — for there she was, without a touch of weariness, a fresh Monica, a vibrant Monica, a Monica with a glow of pleasure in her fact. She was dressed in clothes that no longer seemed a little drab, a little elderly, but were handsomely understated, seductively restrained.
It may sound like it, but this is not a rearranged Dorian Gray morality tale. Still, kind of like Dorian Gray, perhaps the best thing about the story is the writing itself, for ”Miracle Polish” is not quite as powerful as Millhauser usually is and it’s even, sadly, a tad predictable. Still, a welcome tale from one of our masters.
Tonight Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan, won the 2011 Giller Prize!
I did really like that book, which was also shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
Here is a list of the shortlisted books, as well as links to the reviews the Shadow Giller cooked up for them.
- The Free World, by David Bezmozgis (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- The Antagonist, by Lynn Coady (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- The Sisters Brothers, by Patrcik deWitt (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, by Zsuzsi Gartner (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
Tonight the 2011 Giller Prize will be announced. You already know that we on the Shadow Jury already picked David Bezmozgis’s The Free World (my review here), but it wasn’t the easiest choice to make. I liked five books on the shortlist, four of them very much indeed, including this one, The Antagonist (2011), which is my sixth and final review of this year’s shortlist.
First off, I really enjoyed the basic form of this novel. It is a classic epistolary framework, only here the principal character is writing angry emails to an old acquaintance (perhaps too much of a stretch to call him an old friend, though at one time, yes, they were friends). I realize that this may seem gimmicky, but Coady, who is a completely new name to me, pulls it off and then some. Here the form really does suit the story.
Our epistolarian (I can’t call him the protagonist since he is, by way of the title, the antagonist) is Gordan Rankin, who grew up with everyone calling him “Rank.” It was such a familiar appellation that it wasn’t until much later in his life that he recognized the unpleasant association. Since there is no omniscient narrator, we know nothing about Rank before he begins his first email to Adam, a college friend (Rank is now around forty):
There you are in the picture looking chubby and pompous [. . .]
It turns out that Rank and Adam have recently been in touch briefly because Adam has published a book. Rank, putting on a mask, said he was excited to read it and was, in fact, hoping Adam might help him with a bit of writing he was going to do. Adam said sure, and then must have been surprised at the way the above email began. The picture Rank is referring to is the author’s photo on the book, the book Rank had already read and was infuriated by.
Coady let’s Rank riff on about Adam’s weight gain. Sure, Rank is showing his anger, and we know he is angry about the contents of the book, but he is having a hard time articulating the source of that anger. I liked imagining the growing chill Adam must have felt as the first email got more and more menacing, especially here:
I had to stop for a while. I got a bit worked up after writing that and went off to drink and watch a little TV and now I am drunk. I just realized I can write you however I want — drunk or sober — and there’s nothing you can do about it. Isn’t this great.
Adam is, understandably, afraid of what Rank might do. We learn about that fear through little clues in Rank’s emails, including this opening from the second one: “Do what you want. Keep as much of a “paper trail” as you want, I haven’t made any threats.” Adam has no idea where Rank is these days, and as Rank tells his story — he’s setting the record straight that Adam perverted in his novel — we understand a bit why Adam might fear Rank.
Rank is and always has been a large man. In college he played hockey, even had a scholarships — his sole job was to go out and be brutal.
That had been his role for some time. Rank’s father, also Gordan Rankin, only he went by “Gord,” was a small man who, one unfortunate day in 1981, chose to open an Icy Dream franchise instead of a Java Joe’s. After all, the town of 7,500 would never buy into that coffee fad (Rank now, the summer of 2009, looks around and sees six Java Joe’s around his father’s Icy Dream — KFC remarks on how well Coady portrays this transformation in his review (here)). Rank, of course, worked at his father’s Icy Dream, but his main job was to keep it clean of miscreants. If a particularly unseemly crowd of juveniles entered, Rank was to ask them forcefully to leave. His father loved to watch his son throw around his weight; it helped him feel as if he had some power.
Naturally, this leads to several unfortunate incidents, and Rank is well on track to becoming a first-rate loser. Which is all people really expect from him anyway.
At college, Rank meets Adam and a few other rather average, unathletic boys, who were as different from his father as he could find. The stories, particularly the one Rank doesn’t divulge for a long time about the death of his mother, are the ones Rank feels Adam has exploited. Worse, he let everything go the predictable way and in the process made it all false. The emails, principally angry at first, eventually turn into a retelling, a revision of Adam’s false novel.
While we on the Shadow Giller didn’t select The Antagonist, there were times after I finished it that I almost put it in my first-place slot. I was captured by Rank’s voice, which is brutal and vulnerable, and often funny. In the end I opted for a book that I think had more complexities of character, though I wouldn’t be disappointed if Coady pulled an upset and won the prize tonight.
If you haven’t already, please go over to KevinfromCanada’s blog to see who won the Shadow Giller’s vote (click here). We all really enjoyed this year’s shortlist and the longlist, and we had a difficult time choosing the ultimate winner. I still need to review one book on the shortlist, but, as you may have noticed from my absense here, I haven’t had much time lately. I’ll get back on track, get that review up, and look forward to more Gillers in the future!
The real Giller Prize will be announced tomorrow.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Tessa Hadley’s “The Stain” was originally published in the November 7, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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I haven’t had a chance to read Hadley’s third fiction offering this year (and fourth in the last 12 months), but I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, please share any thoughts you may have.
Though I never caught wind of any genuine controversy (certainly nothing that came close to the scope of the controversy the judges’ statements sparked), after Julian Barnes won this year’s Man Booker Prize for his “short novel” The Sense of an Ending (my review here) there were still questions about whether the book was long enough for the prize, which goes to the “best eligible full-length novel,” “full-length novel” never being defined. The Sense of an Ending is only the second-shortest book to win the prize, the shortest being Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (my review here). Shorter ones have been finalists, including J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (my review here) and even William Trevor’s “Reading Turgenev,” which is one novella that forms his book Two Lives.
Anyway, when Barnes won, there were a few interesting bits of commentary on The Guardian website, one from Laura Bennett called “When is a short novel a ‘novella’?” (here) and one from Claire Armistead called “When is a novel not a novel? When it’s a novella” (here). Each uses Barnes’ win to think about the novella’s bad reputation. Publishers don’t like novellas because they don’t sell, so either they don’t publish them or they call them “short novels.” In Bennett’s piece, Armistead is quoted as saying, “[The term novella] has fallen into disuse because it sounds like a patronising diminutive – without the scope of a novel or the discipline of a short story.” In her own piece, Armistead says, “I wonder whether part of the image problem of the English-language novella, at least, is the association of length with vigour.”
In the comments below Armistead’s piece, John Self quotes Saul Bellow’s introduction to Something to Remember Me By, Bellow’s book of three novellas:
Some of our greatest novels are very thick. Fiction is a loose popular art, and many of the classic novelists get their effects by heaping up masses of words. Decades ago, Somerset Maugham was inspired to publish pared-down versions of some of the very best. His experiment didn’t succeed. Something went out of the books when their bulk was reduced. It would be mad to edit a novel like Little Dorrit. That sea of words is a sea, a force of nature. We want it that way, ample, capable of breeding life. When its amplitude tires us we readily forgive it. We wouldn’t want it any other way.
Yet we respond with approval when Chekhov tells us, “Oddly, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read – my own or other people’s works – it all seems to me not short enough.” I find myself emphatically agreeing with this. [. . .] At once a multitude of possible reasons for this feeling comes to mind: This is the end of the millennium. We have heard it all. We have no time. We have more significant fish to fry. We require a wider understanding, new terms, a deeper penetration.
Rather than just list a few of my recommendations this month (which I still do below), I wanted to see what people think of novellas. Me? I love them. Many of the best books I’ve reviewed on this blog are novellas, which neither lack the scope of a novel or the discipline of the short story. I’m sometimes surprised at commenters here and there who say they don’t like novellas (or short stories). One on this site, intrigued by a short book, had the courage to admit, “I generally do away with the short reads because I feel like it is rarely done well.” I think this is a prevalent misconception, similar to the misconception people have about contemporary literature in translation. All things considered, the large English novel is rarely done well either, so usually the problem is not the novella (or the literature in translation) but that the readers are generally unaware of what’s out there (so they don’t buy them, so publishers hesitate to publish them, so they get even less attention, and so on).
But the great thing about this day and age is that novellas that are done well are readily available, so there’s no reason to avoid them.
What are your thoughts on the novella? Do you read them? Do you avoid them? If you avoid them, why? And have you read enough of them to form a solid opinion?
Here are some of my favorites I’ve reviewed on this blog (I’m not holding myself to five this month).
- First Love, by Ivan Turgenev (original review July 3, 2008). I read this in one rather short train journey, and I still remember it vividly. A masterpiece of world literature from a time when the term “novella” didn’t have negative connotations. Today this would be called a short novel. Whatever the case, it goes for the gut.
- The Pathseeker, by Imre Kertész (original review January 18, 2009). This is a selection from Melville House’s fabulous Art of the Novella series (actually, this one is from the Art of the Contemporary Novella series). A strange book that avoids talking about its subject directly, and is all the more powerful for it.
- A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr (original review March 8, 2009). I recommend this book all the time, so you’ll see it again. Best if you just read it.
- An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira (original review May 29, 2009). And yes, I’m going to continue pushing Aira until more of you read him. I’ve reviewed five of his books, each a novella, and I’m tempted to list them all right here.
- By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño (original review July 24, 2009). This is the novella that started to shift my opinion of Bolaño. I started reading him with his mammoth novel 2666 (my review here). That large book captivated my mind, but when I finished it I was disappointed. I didn’t understand it. Slowly (well, over the course of a year) I came to understand it more. By Night in Chile helped.
- The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares (original review September 7, 2009). I know, I’ve recommended this book recently too, but this only goes to show how serious I am when I say that some of the best books I’ve reviewed on this blog are novellas (and literature in translation).
- Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton (original review May 7, 2010). I thought this book was headed to the rather conventional, somewhat romantic ending (and I was loving it notwithstanding). It didn’t end there, though; instead Wharton gives us the most devastating ending I can imagine.
- Daisy Miller, by Henry James (original review May 17, 2010). I have read this one countless times, and just thinking about it now I’m feeling the urge to reread it again. A charming tragedy.
- Not to Disturb, by Muriel Spark (original review July 12, 2010). Not the strangest Muriel Spark book I’ve read, but disturbing enough to make this list. I should have recommended it yesterday.
- Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville (original review February 11, 2011). I read this one for the first time earlier this year, and I now know why I felt like I was missing out: “I would prefer not to.” I get that reference now. But more important are many of the other aspects of this brilliant novella.
So there are some of my favorites. Have you read any of them? Are you tempted to read more novellas?
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