Alejo Carpentier

I have been reading (and writing on) the work of an amazing but little-known Cuban writer called Alejo Carpentier. He was active in the European modernist and surrealist movements in the 1920s and 1930s, and was appointed Ambassador to France by Fidel Castro in 1967. He coined the term 'magical realism' to describe the mixture of fantasy and realism that characterises much of modern Latin-American literature. To give an example, his short story Journey Back to the Source describes a man's life - but with time going backwards. It begins with his death and the demolition of his house, then ends with his birth. His novella Baroque Concerto is a musical extravaganza that starts in eighteenth century Mexico, where a rich burger travels to Europe. He attends a concert given by Scarlatti, Handel and Vivaldi, and ends up in La Fenice opera house listening to Louis Armstrong. These links take you to tutorials and study guides on his writing.

Joseph Conrad and the novella

Joseph Conrad explored just about every genre of prose fiction. He wrote novels, long and short stories, travel books, memoirs, essays, and even experimented with collaborative writing. But the genre in which he seems to be most comfortable and in which he created some of his most carefully crafted works is the novella. This is a work which is longer than a story but shorter than a novel. But it's not just a matter of length. The novella usually has very few characters, the events of the narrative are concentrated on a single issue, and that issue itself is usually of universal rather than just local or temporary significance.

A short story may be based on no more than an anecdote, whereas a novella deals with large scale general themes. A novel can have a cast of dozens and feature multiple locations, whereas a novella can have just two or even one main character, and the setting is likely to remain focussed in one place.

We've just posted study guides to two of Conrad's best novellas, both of them based on his own experiences as a young sea captain. The Shadow-Line deals with the character-building drama of a ship which is becalmed with a sick crew, and The Secret Sharer explores notions of 'the double' and 'alternative selves' when a young captain allows a murderer to hide on board his ship.

More on the novella here

False Readings

Many years ago, in a search for direction with literary studies, I read a guide which recommended Madame Bovary as one of the greatest romantic love stories. I dashed out and bought a copy, and couldn't understand the disjunction between what I was looking for and what was being delivered. It was anything but romantic. I was reading the right novel - but with the wrong preconceptions. Flaubert wrote it as an anti-romantic novel. The same thing happened when I read Moby Dick, commended by the same guide as 'a gripping chase of the Great White Whale'. After six hundred pages, I was wondering when this chase would ever begin.

And now fifty years later, the same thing has just happened in reverse. I decided to re-read Joseph Conrad's famous novella The Secret Sharer, got my copy of a well-edited text from Amazon, and started making notes on 'the double', ambiguities of 'sharing', youthful maturing experiences, and so on. But I was puzzled by the amount of time it was taking the escaping swimmer Leggat to appear alongside. I was half way through the book, and the captain had only just boarded his new command. Then I realised I was reading not The Secret Sharer but The Shadow Line. Right approach - wrong book. Doh!

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton is one of the most unjustly neglected writers of the early modernist period. She was a close friend of Henry James, and even wrote somewhat in his style, but her reputation has not survived as well as his, even though she was a best-selling novelist in her time. We've made a modest effort to rectify this situation from a UK perspective by featuring an impressive biography, as well as creating study guides to her greatest novels The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country, as well as her devastatingly powerful novella, Ethan Frome.

Literary Criticism - a review

Gary Day's main argument in this lengthy and impressive study is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs - at one moment emphasizing the text, and next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism ... more >>

Victor Serge: Literature and Revolution

Marxists have always had a problem with theorising Art. Radical proposals for changing the State and replacing the power of one class with that of another does not sit easily with a taste for Beethoven, Michaelangelo, and Marcel Proust. And political sympathy for an oppressed class (the proletariat) has often resulted in wishing its artistic achievements into being. When a revolution (of sorts) did take place in St Petersburg in 1917, expectations were high that a different art would be formed in the new type of society. And at first it did start to happen. The graphic art of Rodchenko and El Lissitzsky, the architecture of Tatlin, and the poetry of Mayakovsky produced a native form of modernism whose influence is still alive today, almost 100 years later.

But none of these artists were working class, and before long Party apparatchiks were calling for the suppression of their work and demanding art that followed the Party line. Since the party had a monopoly of the means of production and even the supply of paper, they got what they called for. The result was worthless propaganda of the 'boy meets tractor' variety.

Victor Serge was able to avoid these ideological traps more than his contemporaries (and his predecessors) for two good reasons. ... more >>

A Guide to Reading Proust

After nearly 100 years, Marcel Proust's The Remembrance of Things Past remains as formidable a reading task as when it first appeared. Indeed, possibly more so - since it was originally published in single volumes at intervals, which gave contemporary readers a chance to digest its contents slowly. But it now exists in seven volumes totaling 3,200 pages, a million and a half words, and containing more than 400 characters. This is not an intellectual journey to be undertaken lightly, and even experienced readers need all the help they can get to deal with a literary construction of this magnitude. Patrick Alexander's guide is an attempt to provide all the assistance that's required. The book is in three parts. The first offers an overview then a summary of what takes place in each of the seven volumes of the novel. Part two is a who's who - thumbnail sketches of the principal characters, what they do, and ... Read more >>

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Woman Who Did - the New Woman 1890-1914

The short story came into its own as a literary genre at the end of the nineteenth century, as the three-decker novel died its death and the rising numbers of magazines and journals created a new market for shorter fiction. Moreover, the short story, as Angelique Richardson points out in this charming collection, "was concerned with questions rather than answers [and] was perfectly suited to give expression to the turbulence and uncertainties of the late nineteenth century". This was also the age which gave rise to the 'new woman' - the female who claimed her independence, wore what clothes she liked, flirted openly with men, smoked cigarettes, and rode a bicycle. These are the issues which form the background to this very entertaining compilation of stories from the fin de ciécle, which only really ended with the start of the First World War. Editor Angelique Richardson offers an expansive introduction which explains the developments that were taking place at that time and puts the stories into a rich context...Read more >>

more on SHORT STORIES

Work - and a reading break

For the last few weeks I have been engaged in the most dispiriting form of work - that is, work in its really old-fashioned sense. I was hired for a slightly unusual combination of knowledge and skills in the realm of online learning. Then the client proceeded to ignore and over-ride my advice, which completely removed the imaginative element of the contract. This was followed by an endless round of mind-changes, additions, and nit-picking which reduced the IT skills element of the project to a tedious chore. My engagement continued fueled only a professional sense of pride in completing a task once begun.

In fact the remnants of this misery drag on to this day - but at least I have escaped for a reading break. It's a break because I'm on a one-way ticket and in no hurry to leave the continuous days of hot sunshine in which Andalucia basks at this time of year.

My book bag was heavier than usual at the airport. I'm finishing off volume one of Stephen Walsh's biography of Stravinsky. A study of the short story has occupied the last couple of days between tidying the house and stocking the fridge at Mercadonna. Penguin have just issued new translations of The Trial and The Castle, so those are on the table of Things to Do. I've got studies of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to get through, and a very beautiful copy of Woolf's-head Publishing the annotated collection of Hogarth Press book jacket illustrations which were featured at the University of Alberta libraries earlier this year. When these are done, I'll be re-stocking at Amazon.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Franz Kafka is one of the most original and idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century. He published very little during his own lifetime; he lived for literature (in fact he said "I am literature"); he wasn't formally a great novelist or writer of short stories; and yet he put his stamp on literature to such an extent that his name has become an adjective - and we now speak of Kafkaesque situations and circumstances. These tend to be scenarios in which the individual is trapped in madly contradictory situations, confronted by bureaucratic and totalitarian forces over which he has no control. That's why Kafka's reputation soared in the 1930s and 1940s. He prophesied the sort of state which condemned individuals as guilty - but didn't tell them of what they were being accused. He spelled out the mad logic of the show trials long before they took place, and he is quite rightly regarded as a precursor of ... Read more >>

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Maupassant's Short Stories

Guy de Maupassant was a prolific and very famous writer in his own lifetime. Between 1880 and 1891 for instance he wrote about 300 short stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books. He wrote in the heyday of the short story, and it is this literary form for which he is now best remembered. Maupassant was one of the late nineteenth-century writers shaping what was to become the modern short story. His contribution to the genre was to pare down the means of expression and to focus on the effect of the tale. His stories are not abbreviated novels or rambling prose poems. They tell a story - and often it has a sting in the tail. Like other French writers of the late nineteenth century he was keen to explore ordinary everyday life - often exposing its less appetising and even grim features... Read more >>

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The Edwardians - Vita Sackville-West

The Edwardians first appeared in 1930, and was a deliberate attempt on Vita Sackville-West's part to write a best-seller. The amazing thing is that like so many of the other things she did in her rich and unusual life, she succeeded. It sold 20,000 copies in its first two months, outstripping the success of her friend, lover, and fellow author Virginia Woolf. It's a story of the aristocratic milieu from which she herself sprang, and is a rich blend of sentimental nostalgia for a world which had almost disappeared by the time she came to write it, and a critical analysis of some of the reasons why that disappearance occurred. The principal characters are from a single grand family: Lucy a widowed baroness, Sebastian her young Duke-to-be son, his sister Viola, and the glamorous Lady Roehampton who becomes his mistress. But the main character is the Elizabethan house where they live - served by its small army ... Read more >>

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The Diary of a Man of Fifty [Henry James]

Henry James was a prolific writer of stories, in addition to his many great novels. There are over a hundred in the twelve volumes of the Collected Tales - many of them so long that they become 'long short stories' or even novellas, as in the case of The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers. The three stories in this collection are fairly typical - long, quite complex, and not at all seeking brevity to make their point. In fact the tale which gives the volume its title is one of James' least-known stories, and wasn't even included in the Collected Tales. It's also rather unusual, because it's written in the form of a journal. James normally likes to keep the narrative and the point of view tightly under his own control in the form of a first person or omniscient third person narrator... Read more >>

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Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov

Russian literature is rich in examples of famous writers whose wives have acted as unpaid secretaries and copyists. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, and (I suspect) Alexander Solzhenistyn. But Vera Slonim, who married Vladimir Nabokov, took the tradition to unprecedented extremes. They met as Russian exiles in Berlin in 1923 - both dispossessed of fortunes - and she gave up the rest of her life to acting as Nabokov's secretary, typist, business manager, translator, research assistant, chauffeur, and even standing in for him as a lecturer. His output as a writer was large - but as an author still given to writing in pencil on small index cards, then handing them over to her to copytype on an old portable, it's inconceivable that he would have produced half as much without her ... Read more >>

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Common Reading - book review

Alternative titles for this collection of essays might be The Last Men of Letters, Critics and the Marketplace, or even (to choose the sub-titles of two other Stefan Collini books) Essays in History and Culture or Intellectuals in Britain - because it is largely a study of writers 1920-1960 who earned their living as journalists and critics in the world of literary magazines and journals. It's also a consideration of their readership, how they have been forced to change over the years, and the state of intellectual biography in the twenty-first century. He describes the collection himself as 'exercises in intellectual portraiture [and] the nature of the diverse public for whom these figures wrote, and ... the cultural traditions and institutional frameworks within which they operated'. The first half of the book is a series of literary portraits of critics and what he calls 'public intellectuals' - Cyril Connolly, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, E.H.Carr, E.P.Thompson, Perry Anderson, and even Roger Scruton... Read more >>

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Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Beckett's amazingly difficult yet consistent life, which was unrelenting devoted to creativity. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Beckett is a well-known author, but not much is generally known about his personal life. He avoided interviews and shunned publicity - even sending his publisher to collect his Nobel Prize. This short book isn't an attempt to deliver a full scale biography (that has already been done by Deirdre Blair, Anthony Cronin, and James Knowlson) but it offers a potted account of his life accompanied by the most original set of photographs that I have ever seen - some from his personal life, and others from stage productions... Read more >>

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