As you may have learned from my sonnet on The Eye, relatively early on in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novella The Eye, the narrator attempts to kill himself shortly after losing his position as a tutor. He hasn’t exactly lost his position; someone has come into the house where he is employed and unceremoniously beaten [...]
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Benito Cereno, one of Melville’s Piazza Tales, is among my favorite of his work and probably my favorite novella-length item from him. My first post on it, from way back during my maritime lit project days, is still one of my favorites, and I still look forward to reading the real-life journals of Amasa [...] Both of the Tolstoy titles included in the Art of the Novella series are later works. The Death of Ivan Ilych was published in 1886, 11 years after Anna Karenina and 17 years after War and Peace. And while The Devil wasn’t published until the twentieth century, it was apparently written around 1888, the [...] My Life was published in 1896, five years after The Duel, but it seems in some perhaps superficial ways to have the qualities of an earlier work. The first-person narrator is a young man, and a very idealistic one, who has found himself idle in his posts as a clerk and has given up [...] Anton Chekhov’s rather long novella, The Duel, originally published in 1891, is the book that has so far most surpassed my expectations of it. My expectations were not low; I haven’t read all that much Chekhov, but what I have I thought was wonderful. Still, that doesn’t mean a novella—so many of which are [...] The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, has some scenes that are first-rate: well-constructed and affecting. Anthony points to the Kafkaesque qualities of scenes like the one at the sick bed before the family goes to the opera; this is certainly one of them. Ivan Ilych is consumed by his illness and [...] While I’ve been reading the Russian-authored titles from the Art of the Novella series in chronological order, I haven’t been posting on them that way. The two earliest, Alexander Pushkin’s The Tales of Belkin and Nikolai Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled were re-reads for me, so I saved them for Friday and gave [...] The Eternal Husband is one of the volumes in the Art of the Novella series that really pushes the bounds of the word “novella.” At over 200 pages, albeit small ones, it seems a short novel to me, and a bit of a strange one. What can that mean? All Dostoevsky is strange to [...] Anthony said his reading of Ivan Turgenev’s First Love may have tipped his preference between Dostoevsky and Turgenev a bit toward the former. While I have not yet had the pleasure of all Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (I fully intend to), I can see that this is weaker than what I have [...] Joseph Conrad’s novella The Duel represents a certain class of work that “I know when I see it,” but have a hard time describing very well. Let’s call it, as they say, “the work of a master at the height of his powers.” But a caveat is necessary—it’s not a masterpiece, or a master [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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