Early mornings, I've been reading Swann's Way by Marcel Proust. Poet Rena Mosteirin has written about In Search of Lost Time here before and there's no need to rehash it; my true enthusiasm is for the general tactic of combining a massive work such as this with tasty novellas.
To be completely honest, I'm liable to get bogged down in any book over 400 pages. Jon Fosse's Septology was an exception, a big boy of about 650 pages that I paused Proust to devour in a week. Fosse's writing style—book-length sentences with 'and' standing in for periods—is either a revelation or not at all your jam. But typically, no matter how compelling the plot or how lucid the prose, longer books start to feel like a task to finish, perhaps because other books beckon.
Lightening that load and scratching the itch for a new story, I've been reading short works concurrently. In general, I read 10-20 pages of Proust early, as the sun rises—establishing some kind of routine for reading a long work also helps me—then I turn to a little gem later in the day. True, I make multiple hours each day for reading, largely because I don't keep up with Netflix. That's no judgment on Netflix—there's nothing like a great movie—I just prefer reading and a free hour is all about choosing how to resin your brain.
It has been so much fun to scour my favorite library and bookstores for novellas, any fiction longer than about 60 pages but shorter than 200. (Don't quote me on that; it's just my personal benchmark.) A few novellas I've been very enthusiastic about recently:
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
This grabbed me one evening and wouldn't let go, 120 pages that sped by in a strange and ominous arc that ends unexpectedly. Without giving too much away, I can say that it's about a woman—a body artist on the West Coast—who "finds" a man who can mimic voices and recall entire conversations. She becomes obsessed with him to the point where her own self recedes. Deliciously pathological and gorgeously written, this is a DeLillo very different from his famous White Noise or Underworld, yet still very much Master DeLillo.
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
This is a cool draft of water to sustain anyone reading a hefty tome, a brief and delightful story that would seem a fairy tale, but for the main character's financial acumen. Does that make it sound dull? I promise you'll relish this main character, her mother—there's a caveat on that label, but I won't spoil it outright—and their top-crust life in Marrakech, Paris, London, and New York City. It's a keen parable on luck and moxie, on great wealth and "good breeding," on family (or not-family, as the case may be), on a "distinctive person" who earns distinction. My first DeWitt, this made me thirsty for more.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Sure, I'd heard of it, but I had no idea it was a ghost story and absolutely ravishing from the start. It adds enormously to the psychological drama to know that, at the time James wrote The Turn of the Screw, it was illegal for caregivers to "endanger children" by talking of spirits. A governess who did so could expect to face charges. The tale of one such governess encountering specters on an English country estate is dark and fraught and better than any of the three film adaptations I managed to watch for 15 minutes each, but, granted, it all depends on the media you prefer. There is so much depth to the writing here beyond film-worthy dialogue, the kind of writing you experience like a cloud of portent and insight. Here, too, this was my first Henry James and a wonderful place to start.
Still on tap over here: novellas by 2025 Nobel Prize-winner Laszlo Krasznahorkai (Chasing Homer and Spadework for a Palace), Mikhail Bulgakov of The Master and Margarita fame (Heart of a Dog), Muriel Spark (Driver's Seat and The Ballad of Peckham Rye), and Virginia Woolf's little tale from a dog's perspective, Flush. Of course, I'm currently submitting to the gravitational pull of William Gass's The Tunnel. At 650 pages, it's another burly Hurley, but, boy, can this guy write. No, I don't grasp every metaphor or every allusion, but what I can hang onto is some very prime word art, dirty ditties, and searing insight into a historian's career, his subject matter of the Holocaust, and the heavily counterweighted privilege of growing old. This will either become my early-morning bruiser or I will just submerge myself in it completely for a couple weeks. There are so many ways to tackle great books, but this "short-long" method is a style I embrace.
Kate Oden is a freelance writer, editor, and translator living in Hanover. She publishes more brief book reviews on Substack.
