A Golden Jubilee For "Things Fall Apart"

A birthday party for an African classic.

"Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart', which celebrates its golden jubilee this year, is Africa’s best known work of literature. The slim novel has been translated into 50 languages and has sold 10m copies. Never once has it been out of print."

From the Economist.

The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia

In the post-Godfather cinematic imagination, the Mafia have always existed. Dons and their families have big weddings and ghastly shootouts in the booths of Italian restaurants. But after reading Leonardo Sciascia's The Day of the Owl, one realizes the Sicilian crime syndicate was once considered a myth, a legend born out of the aftermath of Fascist Italy.

The novella's story is simple enough: a man is murdered on a bus and the crime is eventually solved by Captain Bellodi, an Italian from Parma but considered a foreigner by Sicilian standards. One of the Carabineri informants leaves a letter after his death (another murder) which links all the crime in the city to Don Mariano Arena, the local family boss. Though the case eventually goes to a high court in Rome, nobody is punished.

Written in 1961, it is difficult for us on the other side of the Godfather to imagine how dangerous it would have been for a writer, even one of fiction, to write anything about the mafia. Yet the coda tells otherwise: "One thing is certain, however: I was unable to write it with that complete freedom to which every writer is entitled." He further mentions that the reader shouldn't confuse the characters in his story with any "real person or actual occurrence." We see this caveat at the end of films or one of the front pages of other works of fiction as part of the required legalese, but to have the author pen a special coda (and thereby stepping out from behind the invisible narrator's curtain) makes one wonder what kind of peril Sciascia had entered by writing The Day of the Owl.

Untrue Confessions

Review of The Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières:


"Two unreliable narrators perform a discordant but appealing duet in A Partisan's Daughter, a new short novel by Louis de Bernières, author of Birds Without Wings. One of them, Roza, a native of the former Yugoslavia, has long been missing; the other, Chris, a mopey old Englishman, reciting his story 30 years after the fact, comes under the heading of 'not dead yet.' He's had one great adventure in his life, and he tells the reader about it in the mopiest of tones. Life has more than passed him by. You might say that life has lapped him many times in the boring marathon of existence. But yes, just once, for a limited time, he fell under the thrall of a modern Scheherazade who (to quote the Beatles) 'filled his head with notions, seemingly."'The storyteller was Roza, and as he listened to her, his excruciatingly dull life was redeemed by the enchantment of narrative -- and the thought of future sex."

Amazon to Sell E-Lit Shorts for 49 Cents a Piece

Novelini?


"If it works for iTunes… Online retailer Amazon.com is offering digital-only bits of literature - Amazon Shorts - for 49 cents each, including samples from new authors, alternate chapters and scenes to well-known stories, one-act plays, classic short stories and memoirs from writers, reports Information week. Buyers can read the works or print them from the Amazon site, download them as PDF files or request that they be emailed as plain text.

Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's VP of digital media, is quoted by Reuters as saying, "We hope that by making short-form literature widely and easily available, Amazon.com can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work."

Publishers have always had a hard time selling and marketing the single, short-form work - the novella, or the novelette, or the even shorter "novelini" - he said."

Novelini.

The Novella Is A Peculiar Beast

Doors Open by Ian Rankin reviewed by author John Connolly.

"The novella is a peculiar beast. To play devil's advocate, it lacks both the succinctness of the short story and the scope of the novel, and often seems to provide a kind of halfway house for ideas that are too involved for the former, but too thin for the latter.

It also seems that the finest novellas eventually tend to be adopted by the larger family of the novel.

Do we really think of The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, Heart of Darkness or The Outsider as novellas?"

Rankin's novella was originally published in serialized form in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The Novella As Feuilleton

A review of a release of a novella that existed in serialized form, but not in book form.

"As did many writers of the past," Bob Perreault explained, "Adelard Lambert published his novella as a 'feuilleton,' a serial novel in a newspaper. 'The Innocent Victim' appeared in several issues of Ottawa's daily paper, 'Le Droit,' but unlike his more fortunate colleagues, Lambert did not live to see his 'feuilleton' published in book form."

Adelbart Lambert's novella, The Innocent Victim, is available here.

BRAVO! Light in the Piazza is brilliant!

Review of a recent production of the 2005 Tony-winning musical, which was adapted from a novella by Elizabeth Spencer.

"Patrons were on their feet Friday evening at the Stevens Center, giving Piedmont Opera's remarkable production of Adam Guettel's musical The Light in the Piazza a well-deserved standing ovation. James Allbritten, the show's conductor, had just taken a bow.

Oddly, the final curtain didn't fall as it usually does after the conductor walks on stage. Allbritten asked audience members to settle down and take a seat.

Elizabeth Spencer, who wrote the 1960 short novel on which Light is based, was in attendance, and Allbritten wanted everyone to see her stand before applauding her for the wonderful seed she had planted."

There is also a 1962 film adaptation.