Word: novella
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. The 1982 Nobel laureate mixes imagination and fact into a suspenseful novella of honor and revenge in a Colombian town...
ONLY WHEN HARDWICK focuses upon a work of fiction does she unite form with content. The title essay, "Bartleby in Manhattan", is one of the finest in the collection. She takes Herman Melville's novella. "Bartleby the Scrivener", and dissects it as a verbal tour de force. Bartleby speaks only 37 times in a story of 16,000 words concerning himself, and each time he speaks he does so in a variation of the phrase "I would prefer not to." Hardwick convincingly equates Bartleby's character with the modern New Yorker; his footlessness is the predecessor...
...several moments in this collection of eight short stories and a novella, characters turn on a radio or record player and listen to country and western music: Crystal Gayle, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. Author Andre Dubus, 47, makes this C & W name dropping seem more than a bid for easy topicality. He writes about people whose lives evoke sad songs and wailing pedal steel guitars. They work at checkout counters, wait on tables, tend bar or fry hamburgers at fast-food outlets. All are somehow stranded, searching for a pattern to their existence beyond the wet circles left behind...
Every tale, whether it was a novella or a paragraph, was given what Thomas Mann called a "conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear and correct style." Kafka's pathological concern for style was so extreme that only a few tales were published in his lifetime. But the meticulousness that made him a dangling, indecisive figure in life produced modern myths in a prose like shards of glass. It was meant to be lucid, and it was intended to cut. It has drawn blood for 50 years...
Shortly after the 1962 release of his first work, the prison-camp novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn composed a prayer-poem, which became part of the body of work honored by the Templeton Foundation. Solzhenitsyn recalled last week, "I was being subjected to increasing pressure and harassment. At this time I experienced a feeling that I had support-supernatural support. I wrote [the prayer] in the consciousness of the various outcomes that could be called my fate: maybe this is the last moment. Maybe this is it." But it was only the beginning...