Ask the Book Lady

Short Literature

Dear Reader,

As it's for a presentation and therefore time-sensitive, I'd like to get right to work on your question. Can you please clarify for me: are you looking for a book about literature -- that is, one that discusses great works -- or are you looking for a book that is a piece of literature in and of itself? Also, if I knew what kind of presentation you'll be doing, I might be able to better advise you. (Plus I'm nosy.)

Thanks for writing,

Deborah Markus
(a.k.a. The Book Lady)

Dear Reader,

Your question is a pleasure and I hope my answer will be of some help to you. Although we tend to think of the greats of literature as huge, imposing tomes, there are some masterworks that are no less accomplished for their brevity.

I realized as I was jotting down notes for your question that I was, for some reason, shying away from plays. Some people find them difficult to read. If you do, just skip ahead a bit, because you don't want to have to do a presentation on something you had to gasp and stagger your way through. You'll feel much more confident with something you enjoyed. Also, if you aren't fluent in Shakespeare's sort of English, now's not the time to try to get a grip on it. He's well worth any work you might have to put into him, but there'll be time for that later.

If you do like him, then I would steer you toward Othello. All that wonderful grappling with issues of race and class and gender and power, and just what was Iago's problem, anyway? I love Iago. I mean, in the sense that he scares the heck out of me and I hope I never meet him in person. But I love to watch him work from the safety of this side of the page.

Also very short and gripping are the plays of Euripides. Given the current political climate, I think his Trojan Women would be almost too appropriate. Written in a time and place in which war and plunder were celebrated, TW dared to show the other side -- how it felt to be on the losing side, especially if you never had even the chance to take the winners on in battle. It's an easier play to understand if you have a bit of background in Greek myths, but the general bent of it is completely, depressingly accessible.

Just as tragic but a bit more bracing is Sophocles' Antigone. Antigone's brothers both died in a civil war. One was on the losing and one on the winning side; their uncle, now king, has decreed that the brother on the losing side must not be given a proper burial, but left to be devoured by animals and the natural forces of decay as a warning to potential insurrectionists. Antigone is incensed by this, because according to the beliefs of the time, her brother's spirit can never be truly at peace until and unless he's had the funerary rites every Greek should. She's a hothead who refuses to back down, even when threatened with death. It's a beautiful play, not even a hundred pages long.

But let's assume that by literature you mean prose -- that is, not plays, not poetry. Not a problem.

George Orwell's Animal Farm is slim enough to fit in a back pocket but packs such a hefty wallop that the last time I read it, I had to make sure I didn't at night. It's not scary -- just horrifying. Yes, it's an allegory for the Russian revolution, but it reads brilliantly as "only a novel." I was a teenager when I first read it, and knew next to nothing about communism or Stalin or Lenin or any of that. I only knew that it was terrible that the animals went from bad to worse when their complaints were so valid and their ideals so high.

All this has been fairly depressing stuff, so let's see if we can't find you something a little more chipper. H. G. Wells' best-known novels are all pretty short, only about a hundred pages or so (unless you bulk them up by getting the copies with lots and lots of footnotes). The Invisible Man is one of my favorite books ever ever. The War of the Worlds is also quite fun. The Time Machine is good, but a little bleak for me, plus the romance is terrible. (Thankfully, there isn't much of it.)

As long as we're touching on Victorian science-fiction, have you ever read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde It's very good and very short and it doesn't matter how many times you read it, you can never get a really good idea of what exactly Mr. Hyde looks like. But it's a lot of fun to try.

Kafka's Metamorphosis (careful on the author of this one if you're ordering it -- don't get confused and buy Ovid's Metamorphoses) is, I do believe, the shortest, strangest book ever written. Seriously, it's less than fifty pages long, and it's a tale of the most bizarre situation you've ever heard, told in the most straightforward, matter-of-fact tone you can conceive of. Simply put, an ordinary man wakes up one morning to find that he's changed into a giant -- well, not cockroach, he's got too many legs for that; but certainly some sort of hideous bug. And it just gets weirder from there. (If you read this and you like it, go on and find The Hunger Artist -- very short -- and The Trial -- novel-length -- which are also by Kafka. I haven't tackled his The Castle yet, but it's on the "someday" list. I do love Kafka's beautiful, pared-down, sometimes moody, often comic tone of voice.)

Also weighing in at well under a hundred pages is Henry James' The Turn of the Screw The modern-day line on this one is that you're supposed to read it and wonder if the governess telling the story is crazy and accusing innocent little children of being absolute demons, and perhaps it might be a more interesting book if that question were a real possibility. But the problem with that idea is that even without knowing what the author intended (and we do know, by the way; James said in so many words that the ghosts in the story were supposed to be real), there are too many absolutely definite instances of the main character knowing things she couldn't possibly have known except by supernatural means. It's an old-fashioned ghost story raised to the level of literature by virtue of its skill and emphases. The haunting is yearning and bleak rather than upfront and bloody. I'd be interested to hear what you thought of it.

I haven't read it in some time, but Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf is beautiful and brief. (And cheap, if you buy the Dover edition.) Woolf claimed that this was the first book in which she'd "found out how to begin to say something in my own voice." It isn't as brilliant as, say, To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, but then again it isn't as long, either.

Speaking of lovely Dover Thrift editions, Willa Cather (who gave us My Antonia, which I've read, and O Pioneers!, which I haven't -- I know, I know, I'm sorry) has a very short novel called Alexander's Bridge that will set you back all of two dollars and eighty pages. I haven't read it yet, but I bought it because the premise sounded intriguing: a man with everything going for him (money, looks, fame) starts up a relationship with an old lover. As he's married, and as the novel was written in 1912, I'm not foreseeing a sweet happy ending here; but it should be an absorbing read. Cather always is.

And speaking of short novels in which married men fall in love with people not their wives and come to unspeakably bitter ends, you could always give Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome a shot. This is a brilliant tiny novel, but promise not to read it in the bathtub. At least get out before you get to the ending. I don't want to hear that you put your head under and never came back up again. Yes, this is not a happy book.

Wharton did write some other short novels that are perhaps not quite so agonized and agonizing. I just reread The Touchstone in which a man publishes the letters he received from a famous woman writer (now dead) who was in love with him. He does this in order to be able to afford to marry. Sweet guy. Madame de Treymes has always struck me as belonging near the top of Wharton's work, but as I say it I also admit that it's been a few years since I've actually read it. Anyway, it's short. As are Wharton's "Old New York" novels. Of these, I especially like New Year's Day and The Old Maid, both under a hundred pages.

I haven't read Death in Venice in so long that I don't think it counts as having read it at all. I mean, I remember that the guy dies, but I think everybody remembers that even if they haven't actually read it at all, so it shouldn't really count. I also remember being struck almost breathless by the prose. I remember thinking something very clearly along the lines of that I really didn't know anything about writing, after all. Not exactly heartening; but then what do you expect from a book with death right there in the title? Balloons and free lemonade?

This next one is so short that you might not be able to get away with it; but the fact is, it is published in a volume all by itself, and it certainly will give you something to talk (and think) about. You said you needed something short and interesting, and frankly it doesn't get any shorter or more gripping than this. It isn't even really long enough to qualify as a novella. But it's a staggering piece of writing, and you'll never forget it. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the most haunted and haunting story to never contain a single ghost or so much as a whisper of the supernatural. Just don't get all excited and buy a lot more of Gilman's stories, expecting them all to be like this. Don't get me wrong, I love her work; but she hit perfection running just this once, and the rest of her stories are a different species altogether.

And as long as we're on the subject of short works about women frustrated with the confines of nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (about a hundred and fifty pages) is one of those books I find myself rereading every year. Yes, I know the main character is selfish and thoughtless and, in the end, not as strong as she ought to be and could be. I also know that this story hit me at just the right place and time when I first picked it up, and nothing can take away the impact of that.

I hope this gives you something to go on. I'm very curious as to what you'll end up reading.

Oh -- and how do I know about so many books? Not so many as I'd like, first off, and I'm not being coy when I say that. There are so many great works I haven't read yet, and so many I've read but haven't mastered, that I feel as if I'm running just to keep up so far as basic literacy is concerned. What I do know I've learned because, well, books are what I do. I worked behind a book counter for years just because I wanted to hang out with books all day and get a paycheck (small) and a discount (bigger) on the books I inevitably bought too many of. Now I live surrounded by thousands of them in an apartment too small for any such thing, and all I want out of life is more books and more time to read them.

When you look at what people can do, you can often get a pretty good picture of what they can't. I can bake but not really cook, and I can't sew or knit or crochet. I can't paint a picture or a house. I clean because I have to, but I'm not any good at it. I can't build anything or make anything, and I get dizzy reading the simplest instruction manual. All I can do is books, and I'd be reading them by lamplight and writing about them at my old typewriter if I didn't live with someone a great deal more accomplished than I'll ever be.

Good luck with the presentation. I hope you enjoy whatever you decide to read.

All my best,

The Book Lady

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