Another 18 Books Under 180 Pages

on Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Well, that escalated quickly. Thanks for the amazing repsonse to my first novella post. Almost two thousand views. Jeebus! It actually got me excited about blogging again, not to mention madly ferreting through my collection, trying to find other novellas that I remember loving. I've also been reading a bunch of short books that have long languished as slim spines on a shelf, peeking out from between those that dwarf them. I'm averaging two to three a day... An absolute joy during these shitty times!

Anyway, as promised, here's the next set of 18 books under 180 pages that you should get your pandemic-fogged brains around. I dare say I think this one is even better.

THE NOTEBOOK by ÁGOTA KRISTÓF
The opening salvo in what is probably my favourite trilogy of all time (Jens Bjorneboe's History of Bestiality comes a close second), The Notebook is a spare, harrowing tale of debasement and despair. Set in a small Hungarian village towards the end of World War 2, it is the story of twin boys who are willing to do literally anything, not only to survive, but to get ahead. That their brand of evil stems, above all, from the moral vacuum created by war makes The Notebook all the more horrific.

CLASS TRIP by EMMANUEL CARRÈRE
Carrère is best known for his brilliant works of narrative non-fiction but, for my money, Class Trip is his finest moment. A father takes his son for a two-week school getaway in the mountains. Soon after the kid is dropped off, one of his classmates goes missing. This is psychological terror at its absolute best.

THE MURDER FARM by ANDREA MARIA SCHENKEL
I'm a sucker for a great crime thriller and The Murder Farm is one I go back to time and time again. A family and their maidservant are found murdered on their farm in rural Germany. Through a chain of voices, snippets, documents and unsettling religious rants, Schenkel leaves it to the reader to piece together the genuinely shocking truth.

THE CREMATOR by LADISLAV FUKS
It is quite unfortunate that Fuks is all but forgotten these days. As a chronicler of the absurdity of life, mostly through the prism of WW2, he is without compare and, frankly, we'd all do well to read him right now. The Cremator is both charming and terrifying, a salutory warning about the ease with which a well-meaning functionary can slide into brutality. The titular Mr Kopfrkingl is always certain that he is doing good - freeing souls from the shackles of this world - even when his cremations extend to the living.

THE TOPLESS TOWER by SILVINA OCAMPO
Ocampo's writing is often overshadowed by her marriage to Adolfo Bioy Casares and friendship with Borges, but she was bloody great in her own right. This wonderfully surreal novella matches almost anything written by the aforementioned "superstars" - a boy is tricked by the devil into entering a painting of a strange tower. Once inside, he too begins to paint, only to find his creations spring to life.

JULIA PARADISE by ROD JONES
I have Tobias McCorkell to thank for introducing me to this forgotten Australaian gem. Discomforting and hallucinatory, to say the least, Julia Paradise is a story of obsession and perversion set amongst the Australian expats in 1920s Shanghai.

KNELLER'S HAPPY CAMPERS by ETGAR KERET
Imagine a summer camp - American style - where all the campers are recent suicides. It's an afterlife with a difference. And it's where Mordy finds himself immediately after death. When he learns his ex-girlfriend is also there, he sets off to find her and rekindle the romance. Yeah, it's weird and sad and should probably come with a trigger warning, but it's also oddly sweet and comforting.

TALKING TO OURSELVES by ANDRÉS NEUMAN
I'm a recent convert to the astonishing beauty of Neuman's writing and, I have to say, I'm very glad to have discovered him during this pandemic. He really is a master of curious empathy and this short novel serves as a perfect distillation of his literary depth: a dying man takes his young son on a roadtrip in an attempt to create one special memory before he dies. While they're away, the mother, left at home, attempts to come to terms with her grief-induced infedility. Through the interspersed perspectives of the boy, the father and the mother, Talking To Ourselves is a richly melancholic meditation on the importance of the small things we most take for granted in life.

MACHINE by PETER ADOLPHSEN
It's almost impossible to describe the experience of reading Adolphsen. I was hard-pressed to choose between Machine and The Brummstein but I think it is the former's manic unpredictability that sealed it for me. A mad, mind-bending collision of fragmentary moments that, taken together, make the reader question the line between fate and chance. It's the butterfly effect on speed. And acid. And mushrooms.

EXQUISITE CADAVERS by MEENA KANDASAMY
Presented as a highly innovative dual narrative, Exquisite Cadavers is mostly about Karim, a Tunisian immigrant, and Maya, his English wife. Struggling to make ends meet, and in the face of constant casual racism, theirs is a love circumscribed by the realities of Brexit-era London. Meanwhile, in the margins, Kandasamy tells her own story of writing the book, giving us a glimpse into the way her own life and observations - particularly of the abysmal treatment of women, political dissidents and minorities in Modi's India - inform Karim and Maya's story. A work of rare genius.

ONE OF THE BOYS by DANIEL MAGARIEL
Scenes of an ordinary domestic life slowly unravel to paint the portrait of a man who manipulates and viciously abuses his children. We see it from the perspective of the younger boy, at first wholly in awe of the father who rescued him from a mother he is told was dangerous and neglectful. It's all great fun, and life in a new town seems like a lark, but then the cracks begin to show.

SENSELESSNESS by HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA
Until I got to thinking about the novellas I love, I'd forgotten quite how incredible this one is. A writer is hired by his friend to proofread the testimony of survivors of decades old massacres in an unnamed South American country. The friend works for the church. Problem is, the more the writer reads, the more he is convinced of the church's complicity in the old regime's crimes. A document of relentless brutality that reads like an indictment of our collective silence.

ADDRESS UNKNOWN by KATHERINE KRESSMAN TAYLOR
Okay, so this barely scrapes in as a novella. At best it's a long short story, but it was published as a stand alone volume so I'm claiming it here. Address Unknown is an absloutely ingenoius epistolary tale in which the reader's initial disgust and frustration at the injustice of life under Nazi rule (and the deceitful duplicity and opportunism of "friends" in crisis) is turned into a weird sense of triumph at the revenge-as-redemption twist. I don't want to give too much away but do yourself a favour and spend half an hour reading this.

KHIRBET KHIZEH by S. YIZHAR
For me, this is the crown jewel of Israeli literature. It was also the first book to truly question the foundational narrative of the state itself. A young soldier takes part in the clearing of a Palestinian village during the War of Independence. It is, in reality, a massacre, one that the powers that be take great pains to cover up. In its wake, the soldier undergoes a personal moral reckoning that ultimately destroys him. That Khirbet Khizeh was written by an Israeli politician is almost unthinkable thse days.

WHITE HUNGER by AKI OLLIKAINEN
Set during a brutal Nordic winter, where crops have failed and people are succumbing to starvation, disease and hypothermia, it tells a tale not dissimilar to something Cormac McCarthy might conjure. A young family sets off on foot towards Russia in the hope of finding food. That's about it. They trudge across the frozen wasteland, witnessing the horrible casualties in nature's war against humankind. Just one warning: don't get too attached to anyone in this book.

IN THE ORCHARDS, THE SWALLOWS by PETER HOBBS
Set free after fifteen years in the dank prison of a repressive regime, the narrator yearns for his lost love - a politician's daughter with whom he spent one moment of intimacy in his father's orchards. It is what sustained him through his suffering and what fuels his recovery. Hobbs is, I believe, a poet and this reads almost like a prose poem. Every sentence radiates with beauty and longing, even in the face of great pain and loss.

THE MEURSAULT INVESTIGATION by KAMEL DAOUD
In what has to be one of the most audacious experiments I've encountered in recent times, Kamel Daoud has sought to reclaim the unnamed Arab murdered by Mersault in Albert Camus's classic L'Etranger and, in giving him a name and life story, not only engage directly with the original novel but also explore issues of identity, colonialism and the ownership of narrative.

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES by ANDREW KAUFMAN
I honestly can't even begin to count the ways I love this book. It is the sweetest, quirkiest, most charming and funny little book I think I've ever read. A lovelorn guy who lives in a world of superheroes sits next to his wife (The Perfectionist whose ex, The Hypno, has convinced her he is invisible and inaudible) on a plane, trying to convince her that he exists. Full of whimsy and sweetness, without ever slipping into cliché, this is the kind of book that will make you feel good about life. And fuck knows we all need that right now.

18 Books Under 180 Pages

on Thursday, September 24, 2020
I had big plans for 2020. Get this blog going again. Make a decent start on my next book. Read some great big bricks that I've been putting off for years. Chew through any others that are released along the way. Now, I sit at my desk staring at my TBR shelf, physically repulsed by the spines of Charlie Kaufman's Antkind, Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckeim's Homecoming, David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue and Alex Pheby's Mordew. Holy shit I want to read them. Especially the Pheby. But the brain fog brought on by the pandemic and all the crappiness associated with it has laid waste to my (admittedly optimistic) plans. And so, like many others, I have been reading short books. Lots of them. Not that I'm complaining.

There's been a lot of chatter on the socials about which novellas people should be reading. Lithub put out a great list. And I loved Caustic Cover Critic's 50 Short Excellent Books You Can Read in One Hit in Isolation. So, jumping on the bandwagon, here's a bunch of novellas I love. I've tried to mostly stick to books that have flown under the radar. Also, I'll probably make a series of these. My novella shelf is jam packed and double stacked!

EAT HIM IF YOU LIKE by JEAN TEULE
Based on a true story, Eat Him If You Like is a deliciously savage rumination on political unrest, mob rule and collective guilt. The deputy mayor of a small French village goes to market to buy a pig for his poor neighbour. But when one villager mistakenly "hears" him make a pro-Prussian comment, the villagers are enraged. Swept up in a frenzy, they kill and eat the hapless poli. Needless to say, it's not hard to find contemporary parallels.


THE GRAVEYARD by MAREK HŁASKO
A crushing portrait of life in Communist Poland, The Graveyard tells of a hapless factory worker systematically destroyed by the faceless powers that be after he drunkenly abuses a policeman.


DOPPELGÄNGER by DAŠA DRNDIĆ
Drndić called Doppelgänger her "ugly little book" and, while she may be right, it also distills everything that was great about her into two strangely-linked stories. It starts with two old people masturbating one another through their adult diapers on a park bench and ends with a man suiciding by slamming his head against the steel doors of a rhino enclosure. In between, we get all the ugliness of 20th century European history. A perfect, sickening gem.


THE TIDINGS OF THE TREES by WOLFGANG HILBIG
In the ashes of what was once a forest, a failed writer encounters inhabitants called Garbagemen who are sorting through the detritus of a destroyed civilisation and arranging discarded mannequins into obtuse poses. This is horror at its most existential.


BESIDE THE SEA by VERONIQUE OLMI
Rendered in a voice so convincing, so maudlin, so devoid of hope, Beside The Sea is the confession of a young mother who has taken her two young sons to a seaside town in order to kill them. There are no fancy tricks here, just the crushingly pained words of a woman who has been failed by the system and sees no alternative but to snuff out their little lives. The single most devastating book I've ever read.


TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE by BOHUMIL HRABAL
I can relate to no character in modern literature more than Hanta, the tragic wastepaper compacter who narrates this novel. Although his job is to collect and crush discarded books, he is also a saviour of greater works, pulling them from the trash piles and stuffing them in his bag to take home. His little house is crumbling under the weight of all the books, but his love for literature far exceeds his sense of self-preservation. One of my favourite books about the love of books.


CHRIST'S ENTRY INTO BRUSSELS by DIMITRI VERHULST
The whole city goes into conniptions when word leaks out that Jesus is back and he's coming to Brussels. Verhulst's book is an hilarious excoriation of our celebrity/religion/consumer obsessed society.


COMEDY IN A MINOR KEY by HANS KEILSON
A "righteous gentile" is bitterly disappointed when the Jew he is hiding in the attic dies, meaning that he will not be able to reap the glory. Plus there's the small issue of disposing of the body. A sharp satire on the limits of altruism.


THE FISH GIRL by MIRANDI RIWOE
A gorgeous novella that makes high art of Somerset Maugham's scraps, The Fish Girl will draw you in gently before plunging a thousand daggers into your soul. A hugely deserving winner of the wonderful Viva La Novella prize a few years ago.


KLAUS KLUMP: A MAN by GONÇALO M. TAVARES
The third book in the consistently brilliant "Kingdom" trilogy of linked novellas, Klaus Klump tells the story of a man devoid of values bumbling his way through a bleakly amoral world. Cold, exististential brilliance. I also recommend Tavares's Neighborhood cycle as an intidote - it's bloody hilarious and absurd.


A WHOLE LIFE by ROBERT SEETHALER
Rare is the book that can so profoundly move me in so few pages. A Whole Life is the story of a very ordinary man, a cripple carving out an unremarkable existence in the Austrian Alps, who is swept up as a bit player in historical moments of the 20th century. I really can't speak highly enough of its subtle, radiant beauty.


PINK MIST by OWEN SHEARS
Ok, I'm sort of cheating here. Pink Mist is a novella, but it's in the form of a prose poem. Still, as a searing indictment on the sheer horror and futility of war I can think of few equals. I think I cried multiple times. Absolutely magnificent.


THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE by MARCEL SCHWOB
Children leave their homes en masse to find the Holy Land, but are instead tricked and sold to slave traders. Those familiar with this medieval legend will somehow still find themselves horrified by Schwob's masterful, dreamlike retelling. Reads like a fable forced through a mincer. I mean that as a compliment.


A DEVIL COMES TO TOWN by PAULO MAURENSIG
The devil, posing as a publisher, turns up in a town full of aspiring writers. Nastiness, petty jealousy and all-round hilarity follow. A pitch perfect fable that is eminently relatable while maintaining that other-worldliness that is the hallmark of the form. Every writer should read this.


THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP by JACHYM TOPOL
The narrator is mistakenly identified by a weird Belarussian cabal, as the man who 'saved' Terezin and made it a popular destination for Holocaust tourists. Hoping to build a monument of their own, they kidnap him and set him on the task of popularising The Devil's Workshop, the 'ultimate' house of horrors. A short, absurdist fairytale, Topol's book hilariously lampoons its subject while giving pause for serious thought about the boundaries of respectable commemoration.


THE A26 by PASCAL GARNIER
Crime fiction doesn't get much better than this masterpiece of amorality. Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Bernard finds himself free from society's shackles. What follows can only be described as a rampage of depravity.


MAD SHADOWS by MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
What was it that Tolstoy said about families? Well the one at the centre of Mad Shadows must be the most singularly miserable, unlikeable family of all time. A thoroughly nasty, unpleasant, misanthropic delight. I loved it!


LATE SONATA by BRYAN WALPERT
Beautifully-crafted, thoughtful, and elegiac, this gorgeous novella has big and profound things to say about ageing, creativity and the nature of love through time that greatly belies its brevity. Another Viva La Novella prize triumph.