Word: novella
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...dozens of pages over the medieval horror of the Children's Crusade, relishes at chapter-length the cold irony of the Pied Piper legend, written out with speaking parts for everyone except the rats. Writhing as he pares away wrecked body parts, Kraft imagines, for the duration of a novella, cynical child abuse during the evacuation of London's children at the time of the blitz (rural lechers taking the pretty preteens into their homes, ignoring the fat and ugly). His mental videotape also conjures, or recalls, a young Thai girl blown to red vapor by a land mine...
...Byatt's recent book, Angels and Insects, is a somewhat uneven pairing of two novellas. The first, "Morpho Eugenia," is a feast for naturalists. This story's butterflies and ants provide the insects of the book's title, while "The Conjugial Angel," the second and weaker novella, is organized around seances, and of course provides the title's angels. Both stories are set against the backdrop of Victorian England's exploration of the natural and supernatural world; shipwreck and return play important roles in both stories; and both shift between two lines of narration: in "Morpho Eugenia" it is between...
...Conjugial Angel" is the weaker half of Angels and Insects. The story's conceit is to pair fictional characters with figures from literary history, and Byatt has much more success in evoking the fictional characters than in breathing life into the historical ones. As a result, the novella has something of the feel of a clumsily-executed insertion of live-action characters into a well-drawn animated piece. Alfred Tennyson, his sister Emily, and the ghost of their beloved Arthur Hallam (his best friend and her fiance, and the subject of the poet's In Memoriam) move through Byatt...
...same River Twice reads at times like a D. H. Lawrence novella. It shares the same elaborate vision of a natural world at once aloof from and akin to humanity. But the autobiographical reminiscences add an endearing personal flourish...
...hoping to get a chance to read "A River Runs Through It" before seeing the film version. I had been warned that Robert Redford's cinematic version of the Norman Maclean novella might not be quite as clear as the waters that run through Missoula, Montana...