10 Novellas

One of my sons famously thought novella was a posh word for a novel. It just refers to a short novel - about 150 pages or less. Here is a list of ten. These are ones I have actually read.

1. Bartleby the Scrivener Herman Melville 1853
2. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson 1885
3. Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899
4. Ethan Frome Edith Wharton 1911
5. Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 1937
6. Animal Farm George Orwell 1945
7. The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway 1952
8. Breakfast at Tiffany's Truman Capote 1958
9. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1962
10. A Month in the Country J L Carr 1960

Novelists 40 Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning (with Age of Innocence) American novelist, short story writer and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. She combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes, they say, with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including President Roosevelt. She wrote a stack of novels. I have only read Ethan Frome which I really enjoyed.

Ethan Frome

I've been reading Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome. It is a well told and powerful tale that reveals a story of passion and sadness in 19th century rural New England. Part of the story teller's art is to book end the piece with references to the then present and these give the main story a strength that it would probably otherwise not have. Only around 99 pages it is quite a work and well deserves the praise it has been given as Wharton's best selling work. Early reviewers though it too cruel but given a little distance one can cope with it easier by hoping nothing so dire would ever happen to me or those I love. It is quite a moral tale in its own way. It is crying out to be filmed. I notice that was done in 1993 with Liam Neeson (director John Madden), how successfully I don't know not having seen it.

Unusual words Special Ethan Frome

In the edition of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome I have just read a number of words are footnoted for comment. I mention two

Carcel lamps are oil lamps that made a bubbling noise, named for a French inventor

(In the "best parlour," with its black horse-hair and mahogany weakly illuminated by a gurgling Carcel lamp, I listened every evening ...) 

Huckabuck is an inexpensive absorbent cotton fabric

(I know there's a huckabuck towel missing; and I can't take out what you done with that match-safe 't used to stand behind the stuffed owl in the parlour.)

That make the landscape lonelier

George Henry Durrie, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

"Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier." (Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome)

Unusual words 04 Mien Taciturnity

Mien and taciturnity are not so unusual but I came across them together recently in the same sentence and although I could tell you what mien is easily enough, I would struggle a little with taciturnity. The sentence is "Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien; but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word." The sentence is from near the beginning of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

Mien is, of course, face or look. It's a bit of a literary word and comes up in R L Stevenson's famous book in the sentence "The middle one of the three windows was half-way open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll ..."
Taciturnity derives from a word for silence and means incommunicative (I'd thought it meant obtuse or difficult to be honest). See W Somerset Maugham Of human bondage "Perhaps his taciturnity a contempt for the human race which had abandoned the great dreams of his youth and now wallowed in sluggish ease; or perhaps these thirty years of revolution had taught him that men are unfit for liberty, and he thought that he had spent his life in the pursuit of that which was not worth the finding."

Book Buys July

Rather quiet on the book buying front this month in some ways. Almost no Christian books bought but two events piled up my supply of secular books.

First, The Times were giving away Penguin paperbacks free in certain places. By this means I picked up the following

1. Green (Adventure)
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
Treasure Island by R L Stevenson
The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
(I missed Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne)
I've read the first two but not the second two. It would be nice to get round to them.

2. Pink (Romance)
The Lady with the Little Dog and other stories by Chekov
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence
(I missed Madame Bovary by Faubert)
I don't think I've read any of these.

Then, second, I was on Oxford Street and they had a closing down sale in Borders (no surprise there, they never seemed to know quite what they were doing). For £1 each I got

Julia Pastrana: The Tragic Story of the Victorian Ape Woman/Gylseth and Toverud

Hans Christian Andersen/Jack Zipes
Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakepseare/Stephen Greenblatt
Text and Experience: Toward a Cultural Exegesis of the Bible/Ed Smith-Christopher

I also got in July for £1 each biographies of George Elliot and Chrisopher Wren in the very interesting people series from OUP (I have one on Ruskin already). The other buy was the very interesting

Why not Catch-21 by Gary Dexter