"The novel is a capacious old whore: everyone has a go at her, but she rarely emits so much as a groan for their efforts," he said. "The short story, on the other hand, is a nimble goddess: she selects her suitors fastidiously and sings like a dove when they succeed. The British literary bordello is heaving with flabby novels; it's time to give back some love to the story."
Alex Linklater
I hope it's not just a sign of laziness, but the older I get, the more I prefer short stories to standard-length novels: the balanced structure, the crafted sentence, the perfectly chosen word.
The fragment even, where the unsaid is perhaps more important than what is on the page.
Not that I don't enjoy the experience of the long, epic read, the unfolding of the tapestry requiring patience, time. But very often I feel that the "standard" length of the fiction we read these days is more a convention than a necessity.
So much could be said more effectively in fewer words.
Or many more.
2 comments:
And poetry. If a short story is a nimble goddess then a poem is her woodland sister, chaste and burning with green fire. Or something like that!
A fragment from Neruda:
Where did the lemons learn
the same catechism as the sun?
Some books are just too damn long for their own good. Which reminds me of what J.K. said about Hagrid: 'Too big to be allowed.'
This is an entire poem by Salvatore Quasimodo:
Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth
Transfixed by a sun-ray:
And it is suddenly night.
This is the original Italian:
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed e' subito sera.
The problem with the translation is that "transixed" doesn't convey the complexity of "trafitto", which means both "transfixed" and "pierced", as in "Sebastian was 'trafitto' by the Romans' arrows".
And here's a poem by Eugenio Montale:
M'illumino d'immenso.
Almost impossible to translate into English. Spanish is a little better:
Yo me ilumino con lo incommensurable.
Still too long and prosaic compared to the Italian.
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