God, I love a short book.
As a reading addict, I have read my share of endless nose-busters. Just last year, my favorite novel (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai) clocked in at more than 700 pages. The book 1929, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, was almost 600 pages.
But I love the feel and promise of a short book, something I can polish off in one sitting, and I often find that the impact of such books runs in inverse proportion to their length. I'm thinking of the authors Clare Keegan (Foster, Small Things Like These), Denis Johnson (Train Dreams), and Benjamin Wood (Seascraper), among others.
Which brings me to my favorite short book of last year: The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten, translated to English by Alison McCullough. Nils Vik is the ferryman of the title and he wakes one November morning knowing he will die that day. He takes to his boat for one last journey down the fog-clad fjord. Along the way, he reminisces about the seminal events and people in his life, particularly his wife, Marta. And he welcomes onto his boat the ghosts of people (and animals, including Luna, his dog) he knew who predeceased him. It is a poignant, wistful, haunting sort of book that makes you think about who is important in your own life and what events most shaped you. And, while it has ghosts and a talking animal (Luna), two of my least favorite tropes in literature (with, of course, the exception of Charlotte, et al.), the whole journey and Nils's compatriots seem totally natural, even possible.
It's written without a trace of sentimentality (hard to do with a talking animal AND ghosts). And oh, what an ending—which I won't spoil here.
The Ferryman has the added benefit of being a paperback release in this country, so it won't break the bank. (I admit I sometimes blanch at paying hardcover prices for very short novels. I just love a good paperback release!) For what it’s worth, the book won Norway's most important literary prize, the Brage.
Of course, as soon as I read it I felt I had to read it again, which sort of defeats the purpose of reading a very short novel, I guess. But the world is full of little ironies like that. Or so I'm learning.
Carin Pratt is one of the remarkably knowledgeable crew at the Norwich Bookstore—and an ardent recommender of books. Before she landed in these parts, she spent 27 years at CBS News, including two decades as the executive producer of Face the Nation.
