Short and sweet

As the title of this blog suggests, when I write here, I write about poetry. However, my own reading fluctuates between phases of only wanting to read verse and gluts of prose consumption. As much as I enjoy fiction, reading it also also makes me realize why I love poetry so much. I have a fairly short attention span, I'll admit, so there is something about the concentrated power of poetic expression that I find attractive. For a few minutes, I see another reality that reflects back on my own. Or, if I am reading a full collection of poems, I may spend a day or so in one poet's company as they guide me through their version of reality. Of course, fiction does this too, but a longer novel means committing to live in the world the author has created for more than just a few hours. Frankly, I have to feel like that world is especially compelling to make that commitment.

The alternative, of course, (and leaving aside the short story or even flash fiction) is the short novel or the novella. The German Romantics had plenty of theories about what a novella was, apart from just being a novel that wasn't very long. Then again, they had theories about most things. What I like about a good short novel is that, as with a poetry collection, I can be caught up in the world of the author's imagination for a relatively short space of time. Short novels don't outstay their welcome and maybe even leave you wanting more.

So, with one foot still tentatively planted in the world of poetry, here are my top ten short novels or novellas (in  no particular order) that are ideal for poetry fans, or perhaps just for people like me whose attention wanders easily. As a rough guide, I'm going for books of less than 200 pages. There is a 6/4 gender imbalance here in favour of male authors, but hopefully there's a good geographical spread. I'd love to hear your suggestions of other short texts for my reading list, especially suggestions by female authors, or perhaps even by some non-Europeans.

Thinking about this list has also made me realize that short novels and novellas also potentially offer the kind of intensity of experience that can also be the province of poetry. Many of the selections below deal with heightened states that would become overwhelming if sustained over a longer piece. They are small books, but they have a big impact.

1. Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

Not really a novel at all arguably, but an entrancing and subtly moving short book of stories about a grandmother and her young granddaughter spending summers on an island in the Gulf of Finland. A book about youth and age, about endings and beginnings, delivering its philosophy gently and with good humour. Nothing much happens, but it is a book about the whole of life.

2. Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

Jakob is enrolled in an eccentric institute whose educational purpose is unclear, if not dubious. He is a petty and pompous little character, whose aggressions and sublimated desires he does not fully comprehend himself. A surreal and at times hilarious book about adolescence and the tension between the need for conformity and the impulse to rebelliousness.

3.  Christopher Ishwerwood, A Single Man

Isherwood arguably recycled his Berlin years a little too often, but for me this short Californian book is his best work. A portrait of lost love and middle age, it deals with tragedy so compassionately and with such a lightness of touch that this remains ultimately a life-affirming read.

4.  Aki Ollikainen, White Hunger

Again, not a cheery read, but this description of the consequences of a terrible famine in Finland in 1867 is also clear-eyed, unsentimental and arrestingly cinematic. Pereine, the publishers, specialize in short European fiction in translation, and this is one of their most memorable publications.

5. Albert Camus, The Fall

A man confesses to a chance acquaintance in a bar, relating how he, who once enjoyed professional success and high self-esteem, came to realize the hollowness of his own existence and the values he believed he lived by. A classic of existentialist literature.

6. Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

The term 'novel' or even 'novella' seems to fall short with this book, which is more of an extended prose poem that charts a love triangle based loosely on the author's own affair with British poet George Barker. Full of agony and exhalation, this psalm to love is heady stuff.

7. Beryl Bainbridge, Harriet Said...

A tale of adolescent hysteria and claustrophobic British provincial life in the 1950s. Harriet and the narrator are inseparable, but Harriet's almost demonic influence leads to a shocking denouement. A book full of childish grown-ups and scarily precocious children.

8. Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault

A novel about literary obsession and the blurred lines between the writer and the work, appreciation and appropriation. Queer romance, literary theory and feverish drama are all in the mix.

9. Theophile Gautier, The Jinx

A gleefully grotesque narrative about superstition and unconditional love. A tale of the uncanny that manages to be simultaneously very Gothic, very modern and very funny. A most disconcerting read. Like Pereine, the publishers Heperus offer many shorter works in translation.

10. B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry's Own Double Entry

Christie Malry is a dull little man, but he soon starts putting his skills as a book-keeper to terrible use as he rails against the injustices of the universe. Johnson manages to make the mad logic of Christie's crimes seem oddly plausible.