Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar is possibly the finest novella of recent times. It takes fewer words to say what novels take twice or three times as many and fail to do. Concision, control, and constraint are the hallmarks of the literary form, and some of the greatest books - from Orwell’s Animal Farm to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea – use the format.
Yet, it is not fashionable, nor is it popular with publishers who think it falls into a chasm between the short story and the novel. Mathematical definitions are not of much help – a novella could be anywhere from ten thousand to forty thousand words. Edgar Allan Poe caught the spirit best when he said it is a creation that is “readable in one sitting.” Ian McEwan calls it “the perfect form of prose fiction.”
Not everyone agrees. Stephen King, who has written novellas himself has called it “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic.”
Of late I have been picking up novellas by writers I haven’t read in fiction before. Elena Ferrante, for example. Her Troubling Love, translated in 2006, is about 124 pages. I was enticed by the review in the New York Times which said: “It’s a smelly book. If Nabokov writes from the eye and Hemingway the mouth and stomach (you want to call room service and then find a gym), Ferrante is one of the few nose writers.” No, I don’t know what that means either.
To present a narrative in as few words as possible, with character and intent being drawn with light touches calls for skills quite distinct from the demands of a large novel or a slice-of-life short story. What is left unsaid is then as important, maybe even more so than what is spelt out.
The novella isn’t a modern invention – it has existed since the 14th century when Bocaccio’s Decameron had stories within stories that were called novellas. It is a pathway towards first meeting and enjoying some of our greatest writers. A good introduction to Thomas Mann, for example, is Death in Venice. Albert Camus can introduce himself to a reader through The Stranger, Voltaire through Candide, Joyce through The Dead, and so on. Marquez thought his novella No One Writes to the Colonel Anymore was his best work, and once said that he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude just so we would read the shorter book!
While novellas conjure up fiction, short-form nonfiction has to go by the generic name. But books like William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Jean Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, Marquez’s Clandestine in Chile, some of them extended essays, might qualify. Each is complete, standing by itself which is a serviceable definition of the non-fiction version of the novella.
Berlin’s book tells us something important about both Tolstoy and the genre. That, while the novella is fiction, writing about fiction is nonfiction.
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