Some great books have no more than 200 pages, so why do we now think that big is best?
From an essay in the Guardian...
In the minds of many readers, Henry James is associated with orotund monsters such as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Actually, the master's masterpiece, to which generations of readers are drawn like iron filings, is The Turn of the Screw, which is just 128 pages short.
James's brilliant near-contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, defied the gravity of the age with a sequence of short classics, notably Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island. Stevenson used to say that "the only art is to omit". Tell that to Messrs Harkaway, Miller and Wood.
The more you look for brevity, the more you find it flourishing in the shadow of fiction's spreading oaks. Herman Melville is now celebrated for that archetypal long novel, the baggy Moby-Dick, his American masterpiece. But Melville is also the author of Bartleby the Scrivener, well under 100 pages, an existential thriller.
1 comment:
some of the shortest books really are the best. I always think of Stephen Kings short works for some reason. He's such a genius when it comes to them.
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