Word: novella
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book, which contains a novella and six stories, is in most ways a letdown. Leafstorm, the long work, is also about Macondo, but it is an early, earnest exercise in which three narrators-a boy, his mother and his grandfather-recall the old man's efforts to give a decent burial to an outcast whom the town wants to leave to the vultures...
...very good novella is crated like a cracked vase in this volume, padded between two undistinguished lesser fictions that serve only to give the book that solid $6.95 heft. The unfortunate excelsior stories, All My Bones and The Call, are summer-weight Southern gothic. in which the author follows the convention of this school by writing about the rural poor as if they were all dimwitted. The title work, Goat Songs, is something else. A series of erotic recollections links a man to his boyhood. The episodes are brief: a flicker of memory, a few moments of musing. Perceptions...
Vladimir Nabokov called it "posh-lost," a Russian term he translates as "crude pseudo literature." Thomas Mann called it Death in Venice, perhaps the most celebrated novella of the 20th century...
...Broken Clown. In his film adaptation, Luchino Visconti (The Damned) pays his utmost disrespect to the original by maintaining Mann's fustian and removing his intention. In the novella, the aging Author-Philosopher Gustave Aschenbach seeks renewal in Venice. But like the fugitive with an appointment in Samarra, he finds death awaiting him. An elusive and beautiful youth, Tadzio, attracts the writer. Though he never touches his beloved, never even speaks to him. Aschenbach is rendered immobile by his platonic affair. A plague of cholera racks the city. At any time the writer is free to leave...
...this published version is her "sorting out" of numerous drafts of chapters, paragraphs and even sentences that Lowry began to write in 1946. It started with his notes on a trip to the islands off British Columbia. These became a short story. Then the story grew first into a novella and finally into an amorphous novel full of Lowry's preoccupations with alcohol, mythologems, cabalistic gewgaws and theosophist arcana. In 1957, two months before he died after a bout of heavy drinking, Lowry was still struggling to tame the surge of words and images...