Who honestly has the time or inclination to finish long novels these days? I yearn for a serene period when I can read The Red and the Black or The Raj Quartet each night before bedtime, but I seem to be imagining someone else’s life. When new content, cool and engaging, is flooded onto YouTube daily, when you have subscriptions to four different websites, and the telephone regularly pings (or rather, zhuzzes) with WhatsApp messages, entering the world of Julian Sorel or the British in India is a struggle. I used to read two or three books a week, very cheerfully, but since around 2016 we’ve lived in a world so swirling and volatile that literature has at times seemed like its shadow. Do most of us even have the stability of character or lifestyle any more to follow a long book to its end? The me of today might want to read Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, but tomorrow’s version, I know, may feel very differently about it. Increasingly I feel a kind of deadness surveying any book much longer than three hundred pages. It will all end in tears.
If you plan to give someone a book for Christmas in 2024, for God’s sake have mercy and give them one of these
There are short stories, I suppose, but who do you get to discuss them with? One of the pitfalls of liking Chekhov is that you only really get to talk about the plays with others. Mention the short stories, and they’ve always read a different one (I’ve searched high and low for someone who knows Chekhov’s Murder, a miniaturised masterpiece, but nobody ever does). Yet in between these two extremes, the Chihuahuas and Great Danes of literature, lies a more comely creature altogether: the short novel of under 200 pages, perfect for carrying around in your pocket or holding in your hand, and which seems designed for the modern age. If you plan to give someone a book for Christmas in 2024, for God’s sake have mercy and give them one of these.
I am full of gratitude when I see books this length (and there are plenty these days) – to the writer for cutting and not imposing on my time, for the gift of a world I can enter in an evening and then, without regrets, leave behind. I could cite numerous short novels here: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna (168 pages) about the Stalinist terror, Victor Hugo’s stomach-churning Last Day of a Condemned Man (78 pages) or A Hero of Our Time (158 pages), Lermontov’s vivid 19th-century tale of the Caucasus. But below are three others which come highly recommended.
The first is by Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian-born writer who died in 1989 and wrote a series of vivid, deep novellas about the Mafia. Of these, The Day of the Owl is probably the best one to start with. A Cosa Nostra hit has taken place in a small Sicilian town, and a policeman is sent from the mainland to investigate. Nothing much happens in The Day of the Owl (no final arrest, no absolving outcome) but Sciascia, in a book that’s as far away from a straight crime novel as you could imagine, gives you an entire subculture. It’s a world of strong coffee, sawn-off lupara shotguns, hushed voices and drawn blinds. The law of omerta rules – people look the other way and remember nothing – while the odd informer, ‘terror lurk[ing] in him like a rabid dog’, dreams he’ll grass his way to a better, still tawdry life. On a first reading of the book, this delicious monologue by a Mafia don was something I wanted to copy out longhand or commit, maliciously, to memory:
Humanity – all hot air, that word – I divide into five categories: men, half-men, pygmies, arse-crawlers – if you’ll excuse the expression – and quackers. Men are very few indeed; half-men few, and I’d be content if humanity finished with them… But no, it sinks even lower, to the pygmies who’re like children trying to be grown-ups, monkeys going through the motions of their elders… Then down even lower we go, to the arse-crawlers who’re legion… And, finally, to the quackers; they ought to just exist, like ducks in a pond: their lives have no more point or meaning… But you, even if you nail me to these documents like Christ to His Cross, you’re a man.
Another master of the short novel – and no quacker – was Kundera’s Czech contemporary Bohumil Hrabal, a dreamy and poetic writer, light as a feather (and his books, many at under 120 pages, don’t weigh much more). He wrote Closely Observed Trains (about a provincial wartime railway hand) or Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, his floating, endless sentence recounting the erotic memories of a 70-year-old cobbler (Hrabal’s books are nearly always about little people and their voluminous, fantastic inner lives). My favourite of the lot is Too Loud a Solitude, the story of Haňťa, a worker under communism in a paper-recycling plant: ‘For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper. And it’s a love story… I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas.’
Among the discarded refuse he works with, Haňťa, a beer-swilling autodidact, finds rare volumes or great works of literature, to be snatched up and purloined home. Shuddering at night under the mass of books in his house – Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Camus, Lao Tze, all of them old friends to him – he ruminates on the inner lives of the mice in his basement or the armies of rats in the sewers of Prague. He recalls the lost gypsy lover of his youth, sent in wartime to a Nazi concentration camp, never to return. Politics are never far away in this whimsical tale: Too Loud a Solitude was written during the ‘normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia, when the creativity of the Prague Spring was stamped out and sacked intellectuals ended up working as miners or boiler-stokers. At under 100 pages, this lyrical, pin-sharp portrait of a culture fighting for its survival cuts deeper than many books five times its length.
Possibly the best short novel I’ve read is Colin Thubron’s A Cruel Madness. At 178 pages, it’s a form that suits Thubron perfectly – he’s a writer who likes to trim, boil everything down to its essentials and cut out all the domestic detail. In this tale, an obsessive love affair recounted by the most unreliable narrator ever, we’re privy to the inner life of a man unhinged by Eros. There may be something airless to the book – it’s set in a series of institutions – but it also soars, giving you the torment and magical thinking of a specific kind of grief. This is writing palpably from the heart, with a ferocious anguish to it, and you end up feeling no one has better described the delirium following the loss of a lover and the entire world they represented. I have a couple of hours spare this evening, perfect for a novel of this length and – if YouTube gives me a free pass – may read the entire thing again.
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