Short and Sweet

Janet Tay in today's Starmag writes about novellas - Little Books, Big Punches she calls them.

She strongly recommends to local readers (as I strongly endorse!) :

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915) (read online here)
  
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937) (read online here)
  
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (1958)

and reviews each of them. (In the print version of the newspaper, there is a 30% voucher for each of these titles from Kinokuniya.)

Two recent novellas I would add are Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both shortlisted recently for the Booker prize.

I last wrote about novellas here and really do think they are a great way in to serious fiction for the reader who may be put off by the length of a full-length novel.

Pakistan's Fast Bowlers

Shashi Tharoor writing in The Times of India (found via The Complete Review) finds that although Pakistani Fiction in English got off to a slow start :

... the Pakistani diaspora has in recent years produced a remarkable series of novels with affinities to Pakistan and with narratives often set there ...

among them Mohsin Hamid :

... whose two novels Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist notably finally woke up the rest of the world to Pakistani fiction in English.

and several younger writers including Nadeem Aslam (right) (Maps for Lost Lovers). Tharoor mentions too the debut of two remarkable novels - Mohammed Hanif's :

... exuberant and risk-taking A Case of Exploding Mangoes

and Ali Sethi whose :

... about-to-be-published novel, set in Lahore, is the story of a fatherless Pakistani boy rose in a family of outspoken women, and has already received a gigantic advance. Even India hasn't yet produced a 23-year-old world-class author. The future of Pakistani writing in English seems not just secure, but exciting.

Mohsin Hamid (left) has apparently identified an interesting phenomena which he calls the "fast-bowler effect", which is something we're also experiencing here in Malaysia :

... one writer, like one fast bowler in a cricket team, finds it difficult to make an impact, but when there is at least a pair of them, the world suddenly starts taking the team seriously.

(Image at top by Hamzah Shah on Flickr.)

Size isn't Everything, Y'Know!

Ian McEwan answers critics who suggest that On Chesil Beach isn't long enough to win the Booker. At the New Yorker Festival:

He brushed off discussion in the British press on whether On Chesil Beach was a novel or a novella and questions over whether it should have been entered for the Man Booker prize. "That's their problem, not mine," he said.

Quite.

The same article in the Australian also points out that Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (which I'm reading at the moment) is only 45,000 words long. Thought I was zipping through it rather fast.

Postscript:

As if to answer the question, just came across this passage in Mohsin Hamid's book:

"It's done," she said solemnly. I waited for her to say more, and when she did not, I asked, "'It' being?" "My manuscript," she said "I'm sending it to an agent tomorrow." I took it respectfully in both hands, resting it flat across my upturned palms. "Congratulations," I said, and then noticing it was rather light, added "Is that all of it?" She nodded. "It's more a novella than a novel," she said. "It leaves space for your thoughts to echo."