twentieth century literature

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.19

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The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner (1984) was apparently hailed as one of four perfect short novels in the English language. If I was Helen Garner I would sigh with frustration at such accolades being on the jacket – how is any novel going to live up to that?  But it is excellently written, and in a nice W&N Essentials edition too.

The story revolves around Dexter and Athena, a happily married couple with two children, Arthur and Billy.

“They were friends. They lived in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls were cracking, its floor sloped and its doors hung loosely in their frames.”

Dexter meets an old friend Elizabeth, who has caring responsibilities she wishes she didn’t: her much younger, chaotic sister Vicki. Dexter is pleased to see her, although its unclear if it is Elizabeth herself he’s pleased to see, or what she represents:

“Dexter was mad about the past. He believed in it, it sustained him, he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything.”

Elizabeth is living a very different life with her sort-of boyfriend Philip. It is the steadiness of what Dexter and Athena represent in contrast that draws Vicki from her sister and Philip, towards those with a more conventional set-up:

“She loved the notes they left for each other, the drawings and silly rhymes, the embarrassing singing, the vegetable garden, the fluster under which lay a generous order, the rushes of activity followed by periods of sunny calm: Vicki was in love with the house, with the family, with the whole establishment of it.”

But Athena and Dexter aren’t too good to be true. There are pressure points in any relationship and without malice, Vicki, Elizabeth and Philip start to force these open.

We follow Dexter and Athena into a more unstable world where the structures they have surrounded themselves with begin crumble. What I thought was a masterstroke was that Garner doesn’t portray this in a linear fashion. We jump forwards, there are gaps, not everything is spelled out. It stops what is in some ways a very ordinary story from becoming pedestrian, and it reflects the way the characters continue along their lives until something jolts them out of routine.

The characters are well realised without being cliches too. Athena is a loving homemaker, but she isn’t self-sacrificing. I found shocking this casual admission about her son Billy, who has an unspecified disability:

“I’m just hanging on till we can get rid of him.”

And Elizabeth, more freewheeling and self-focussed, surprises herself when Vicki moves out:

“She went home on the tram and was surprised to find a small lack in herself, a blankness where the unwelcome responsibility had been.”

Garner isn’t interested in what is easy. She is so skilled at presenting complex human beings while not seeming to take a view on them: they are as they are. I think I preferred The Spare Room of the two Garner’s I’ve read, but that is more to do with themes that I’m interested in rather than the novella itself. Either way, I’m keen to read more of the fiction and non-fiction by this skilled, clear-sighted writer.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.18

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Well, I didn’t read a comic novella to get over my Yonnondio trauma in the end, because my Wodehouse in the TBR was too long, and The Guardian published its list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time which had Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (1922) on it. I’d put this aside to read sometime this month and so I took the list as a nudge to move it up the pile.

(I’m not sure how much longer my old Granada paperbacks are going to last, they’re very cheap. But I’m sentimental about them because they were the editions my mother – an enormous Woolf fan – had when I was growing up.)

Jacob’s Room portrays Jacob Flanders from childhood at the start of the twentieth century through to young adulthood at the timeof the First World War. It isn’t a character study though, as Jacob is shown obliquely, in impressionistic fragments, mainly through women in his life. Time collapses and viewpoints shift back and forth.

One of the more extensive portraits we have as readers, after a childhood holiday in Cornwall, is from a woman on a train Jacob catches to Cambridge:

“But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he was in some way or other—to her at least—nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done—for instance, when the train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put the lady’s dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: “Let me” very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.”

This is a recurring theme throughout the novel: women find Jacob attractive, his shy reticence drawing them in. Yet Woolf also shows his youthful callowness. He is an intellectual snob, but with so little meaningful experience to draw upon:

“For the moderns were futile; painting the least respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?”

Jacob is somewhat ambivalent towards women, although he has a sexual relationship with an artists’ model named Florinda. He seems indifferent to the attentions of Clara Durrant, someone more typically of his social circle:

““I like Jacob Flanders,” wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. “He is so unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to him, though he’s frightening because …” But Mr. Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women! “No, no, no,” she sighed, standing at the greenhouse door, “don’t break—don’t spoil”—what? Something infinitely wonderful.”

I love that detail, of Clara not wanting the recording of her feelings to spread beyond the confines of the allotted page. I feel like Woolf’s humour isn’t always given enough credit, and this also stood out to me as an example:

“Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor.”

Woolf’s portrayals of London are always so instantly recognisable, even 100 years on, but I must admit I’ve never noticed tortoises on Southampton Row.

I can imagine the enigma of Jacob at the centre of the novel could make for a frustrating read for some, but I thought it worked beautifully. Writing in 1922, Woolf was living among a generation that had seen countless young men cut down (foreshadowed with Jacob through his surname), and I thought she captured that loss so sensitively, the potential stopped short:

“And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, however lustily they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among us half contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to be played on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speak beautifully, each word falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble-bubble of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to go—oh, but Mr. Flanders was only gone to get a programme.”

I love how Woolf mixes the high-flown with the prosaic, in that passage where another artist’s model is reflecting on Jacob, and here too:

“But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

For me, reading Woolf means you have to sink into her work – she is immersive, and you have to give yourself over to the experience. This was her third novel and while I thought it not quite as strong as some of her later work, I still loved it.

Jacob’s Room makes brave choices in having the central character remain so enigmatic, but in doing so Woolf captures something of the unknown that endures between people, as well as the devastation of a specific generation of men.  

“But then, this is only a young woman’s language, one, too, who loves, or refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever precisely as it was that July morning. And moments don’t.”

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.17

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Earlier this year I read Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle for the 1961 Club. I was so impressed I was encouraged to finally get Yonnondio: From the Thirties off the shelf for this month of novellas. Olsen started writing this during the Great Depression when she was only 19, but she put it aside to raise her family and later published it in 1974, although it remains unfinished.

I only write about books I recommend, and I do recommend Yonnondio because it brilliantly evokes the grinding poverty of itinerant workers in 1930s America. But good grief, it is bleak. Unrelentingly, grindingly bleak. Which is the whole point, but it did make it a bit of a slog at times, even for such a short book.

It opens with the Holbrook family living in Wyoming. The father Jim works in the mine, where the prospect of mine collapse/explosion looms large over the whole town. His wife Anna is raising their family of four children (more by the end) on no money, not helped by the fact that Jim drinks a lot of his wages.

“Mazie pushed her mind hard against things half known, not known. ‘I am Mazie Holbrook,’ she said softly. I am a-knowen things. I can diaper a baby. I can tell ghost stories. I know words and words. Tipple. Edjication. Bug dust. Supertendent. My poppa can lick any man in this here town. Sometimes the whistle blows and everyone starts a-running. Things come a-blowen my hair and it is soft, like the baby laughing.”

It is a terrifying event with Mazie which stops Jim going to the bars and the family move to South Dakota to work as tenant farmers. Here they achieve the nearest they have to happiness, with Jim working outdoors, the children enjoying school, and Mazie drawing the attention of their elderly neighbour who recognises her intelligence and lends her books.

“After a long while Anna would laugh, a strange mirthless laugh, and rise to go into the house. Then Jim, too, would follow, knocking the ashes out of his pipe onto the vine, giving a last broad look over the night and the earth. Sometimes seeing them sit so in the night, a sharp unhappiness would pierce the golden haze in Mazie’s heart; but the blur of days descending so swiftly would wash it out again.”

However, as they were warned, tenant farmers work themselves ragged to earn practically nothing and usually end up owing money. As this occurs, Mazie’s books are sold and the family move again to Omaha. Now they are in a city, near a slaughterhouse which we are repeatedly told, makes the whole area stink of vomit. The family really seem doomed now – the children hate school and all become ill, Anna has a miscarriage, Jim is drinking again.

Olsen brilliantly portrays the hopelessness of the Holbrook’s situation. All they want is to earn enough money to feed their family and live comfortably – not too much to ask. Anna is desperate for her children to increase their chances through education, but the moving around risks this. The casual domestic violence, illness and stress also incrementally destroys the children, even when they don’t fully understand it:

“Ben saw too – but in the confused, entangled way of a small child whose mind is a prism through which the light shatters into a thousand gleams and shadows that can never come whole. Say rather, a weight, an oppression dragged always in his chest; a darkening shadow hovered over his days in that in moments descended on pierced sharp claws on his heart. Only he did not know why or how – he but knew there was a darkening where there had been light, he but felt there was a weight where there had been a lightness.”

Where the novel finishes actually offers a glimmer of hope, but this wasn’t the intended ending. In Yonnondio, Olsen has written a powerful portrait of the failure of society to allow all its members the potential to thrive. She demonstrates how poverty degrades and brutalises, and how the biggest impact is inevitably felt by the most vulnerable. I’m glad I read it but I’m also hoping I have a comic novella somewhere on the shelves to help me recover, maybe some Wodehouse…

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.16

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Halfway through NADIM 2026! I’m frankly amazed, having only really decided to go ahead on 30 April. I’m still not sure I’ll finish as I’ve home renovations this week and two very busy work weeks coming up, but honestly I’m taking the halfway point as a win in itself!

The Faber Editions series seem to choose their titles impeccably, and Emily Holmes Coleman’s only novel, A Shutter of Snow (1930) is another powerful, haunting choice. (Or good book to take a snooze next to, according to my cat.)

Emily Holmes Coleman drew on her own experience to detail Marthe Gail’s post-partum psychosis, from when she is admitted to a residential mental health unit up until she feels well enough to return home again. It is a disorienting, visceral narrative that places the reader alongside Marthe as she struggles with reality in a setting where avoiding it seems an entirely reasonable thing to do.

Marthe’s admission to the ward is told in a confusion of images, jumbled sentences which jump rapidly between subject and object, baffling yet also evoking perfectly the despair and violence of her arrival.

“The keys jangled from the waists of the nurses. They rattled like silver dish pans and swung chanting high like death songs. They were brittle and ice cold and had faces of stagnant riders from the snow. They were proud, and deliciously ate their indifference.”

At some point in that passage I think the ‘they’ subject changes from the keys to the nurses, but Marthe is so completely displaced it is by no means certain.

Telling the story from Marthe’s point of view but in the third person – occasionally first person –  brilliantly conveys her rapidly shifting perspectives and slight detachment from what is happening. Trying to keep up with her means the reader struggles to keep track and maintain a viewpoint, just as Marthe does.

Here she is anticipating a visit from her seemingly supportive husband, but he does insist on her being silent/passive, which perhaps explains Marthe’s seeming ambivalence here:

“He was coming today. It would be some time before the red lights. He would come stalking in the door with his gentle hands and would smile at everything she said. He would look up from under his eyebrows and demand to know what she meant. He would have purple sandals and a crown of laurel. He would bring her a casket of roses and she would crush them on the floor. And there would be under his coat to the little snow-haired baby with clenched hands.”

That quick shift to violence consistently – yet unpredictably – occurs with Marthe. She will be calm and seemingly content, before suddenly spiralling and lashing out.

But she is subject to violence too, including state endorsed violence. There are numerous episodes of her being restrained, bound repeatedly in strips of cloth and blankets, attacked by other patients, and also forcibly medicated. The Shutter of Snow is a very difficult read, both structurally and in terms of subject matter.

But there is humour in the novel too, particularly in interactions with the medical professionals:

“Dr Brainerd said Marthe earnestly, just because I’ve got a toxic exhaustive psychosis is that any reason why I have to be treated like a dog?

Who told you you had a toxic exhaustive psychosis? said Dr Brainerd. You think I have anyway said Marthe, and someday you’ll be rather astonished when you find out what it’s all about. I don’t think I’ll lend your husband anymore books said Dr Brainerd.”

The lack of punctuation and speech marks there is indicative of the whole book, contributing to sense of an askew narrative without becoming entirely incomprehensible. The novel steadily becomes more coherent, reflecting Marthe’s gradual recovery.

The Shutter of Snow is a fully immersive read, where you sink into Marthe’s world of institutionalised reality, delusion, dream, fantasy. It is extraordinary in how it brings Marthe’s experience to the reader. Emily Holmes Coleman is a stunning writer and on the strength of this I wish she’d written more.

“The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.” 

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.15

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I had an interesting experience reading The Gulls Fly Inland by Sylvia Thompson (1941). The blurb on the back made it sound like a thwarted-lovers type story. This wouldn’t really pique my interest but the war setting and reliability of Handheld Press’ choices meant I decided to give it a go.

Around page 70, I wondered why I was enjoying it, when the characterisation of the love interest, Vernon, was practically non-existent. I knew basically nothing about him. Yet I was enjoying the novel because in fact, it was more to my taste than I’d expected, portraying families and changing interwar society with an elegiac tone. I returned to the novella, and a few pages on there was this:

“I have been reading what I have written since I began. So far I think I have made better portraits of people I have loved less. […] Whatever I have written of Vernon seems true, but like a conventional photograph; not evocative. […] Perhaps I have only added up little characteristics, but failed to explain him.”

Well, that acknowledgement won me over entirely!

The Gulls Fly Inland takes the form of a diary written by Blanche Lancret, a young French woman exiled to England by the Second World War. She begins on 3 October 1939, and writes not only of her current circumstances but of her past, her friends and family, and her romance with Vernon, brother of her American schoolfriend Annabelle.

Throughout the diary, as she pines for Vernon, she also pines for France, Europe, and a time she knows is lost forever:

“For, as my father gave me one Paris, and my schooldays another, Vernon gave me still another; and the roots of the third Paris are those we followed together […] in this Paris, which is the one I have still in my heart, there are corners made significant by our moments of brilliant feeling as by sudden effects of floodlight.”

Blanche’s life is one of reasonably wealthy privilege. At the start of the novel she has Annabelle’s baby, her goddaughter, Camilla Blanche, living with her, while the rest of the Annabelle’s children recover from chickenpox. But of course she doesn’t have to care for a baby, the nanny has come too. She and Annabelle met at boarding school, and Blanche spends her holidays on the French Riviera with my favourite character, her mother’s half-sister Tante Julie.

“For I knew, by now, that my aunt, though never actually demi-mondaine, did not take part in any reputable social life; and did not desire to. I did not understand then her greatest distinction, which is that she lives according to her own values; and of all the artificial values respects only money and fashion.”

I also found Tante Julie’s love interest, Otto Behrens, more fully realised than Vernon:

“I was charmed by his brown bird-lidded eyes which shone clear with his natural goodness of heart, for unlike many worldly people he loves his world.”

Blanche’s father is loving but incapacitated by grief for his wife who died of pneumonia. He lives in Venice, physically and somewhat emotionally distant. And so the impact of the war will be felt across the continent in a very personal way for Blanche.

As time goes on, we see a maturing of Blanche, from schoolgirl to young woman who is increasingly aware of the world, politically and socially.

“Suddenly seduced, as happens to me from time to time, by England, or at any rate by the England which I have been able to enjoy—that is, which ignores a dozen Englands which I either do not know or do not wish to experience; industrial England, political England, England expressed in Midland towns, in dockyards, in suburbs, in slums.”

The Gulls Fly Inland is a very subtle novel. The sadness of what it portrays crept up on me, as Blanche’s friends and family gradually accept that their lives are changing forever, by forces beyond their control. There is love in many guises here: romantic, familial, between friends, for place and for time. It is truly moving, and of course, at the time of writing, Sylvia Thompson did not know what the outcome of the conflict would be.

Although sad, the resilience and strength of the characters means it is not depressing. There are sparks of humour too, as Blanche can be a witty and slightly spiky narrator:

“What Annabelle says is often self-evident, but she gives the sentence to you like a present, prettily tied up with a ribbon of your favourite colour.”

So The Gulls Fly Inland wasn’t at all the book I expected, and so much the better for it – but for those of you without wizened hearts like mine, rest assured there are some romantic moments too!

To end, a wartime classic apt for Blanche and Vernon, and I chose a version sung by an American group in honour of Vernon:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.12

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The British Women Writer’s Series is doing such a wonderful job rediscovering lost gems, and Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts (1945) is no exception. I really enjoyed this witty, tense novel from a new-to-me writer, and it was in a typically lovely series cover too:

Set in the 1930s, the wonderfully-named Penelope Shadow is three years older than the century and living with her widowed sister-in-law, her nephew and niece. She fails at every job she attempts, until she hits on the idea of writing. Her historical novels featuring bold heroines are moderately successful, until one of them becomes hugely successful.

“Miss Shadow herself was one of those women who is never described without the diminutive: the sweet little thing, a funny little thing, poor little thing, and, of course, after ‘Mexican Flower’, a clever little thing.”

Penelope’s inability to manage day-to-day routines means she is consistently under-estimated. But when her sister-in-law plans to remarry and emigrate, Penelope realises she needs help. I wondered if this wry observation was a piece of self-satire by Lofts:

“For behind Penelope Shadow stretched a long, long line of scribes and daubers, adults in their own peculiar world, but children in this one, vague, feckless, thoughtless creatures always sheltering, consciously or unconsciously, behind some sensible, practical person.”

Penelope has a phobia of being in a house alone after dark, and so she wants a live-in housekeeper. After a series of failures in this regard and following a Gothic interlude in a guesthouse, she leaves with a young, good-looking waiter:

“For Penelope had secured a treasure. There was no other word for it. She had won not only a housekeeper who could cook, and a cook who could housekeep, she had, all in one person, a nurse, a mentor, a chauffeur, a chambermaid, butler and steward.”

But there is an underlying sense that all is not as it seems with Terry Munce. This is compounded when she is visited by her more worldly, pragmatic writer friend, who genuinely sees Penelope as she is, and yet has not taken to Terry at all:

“Miss Fletcher was enchanted, not with the pretty young prodigy whom she had at first taken Penelope to be, but with the odd, contradictory, unpredictable person that she really was.”

As the story progresses, Lofts shifts Lady Living Alone from a domestic comedy of manners with an endearingly eccentric heroine, into a tense domestic noir, with an eccentrically vulnerable heroine.

She also uses Penelope’s situation to make some pointed observations about the legal position of women at this time.

“She knew, even as she settled down to her own job, in her own house, that she was not her own woman in the same way that she had been”

(The supporting material in the BLWW series is always helpful and the timeline; Preface from Alison Bailey as Lead Curator; and Afterword from Simon Thomas, Series Consultant, provide useful context on this issue.)

Such is Lofts skill that the shift in tone and wider political points never jar. I found Lady Living Alone immediately engaging, and then absolutely compulsive as I whizzed through it without any sense of how events might play out. I’m trying to avoid spoilers so that anyone who hasn’t read it might have the same experience, and so I’ll end the post here!

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.10

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I can’t remember where I first heard about the 2022 reissue of Rosemary Tonks’ The Bloater (1968) but I remember thinking it sounded appealing. Just four short years later and here we are!

The narrator is Min, who works at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (apparently Tonks recorded a poem with this forerunner of experimental, electronic music).

“Obviously it’s no good being slightly vulgar; you must be absolutely vulgar. Taste in the arts and theatre should never be confused with good taste, which is static and middle class.”

She is married to George, who barely gets a mention throughout the entire book. The titular Bloater is Carlos, her opera-singer tenant who is trying to seduce her, which Min seems to find in equal measure repulsive and captivating.

“And until the moment he enters it, the bedroom is only a very ordinary room with a bed in it. Then suddenly—snap pool! It’s a boudoir, it’s a dangerous liaison, it’s the fourth floor of a Lisbon brothel, it’s Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV all over again in some unaired voluptuary’s den.”

Meanwhile there is also Claudi, an older male friend caught up in the shenanigans, Fritz the cleaner, Billy her colleague and potential lover, and Jenny her colleague who is thrall to her lover ‘the guitar’. Min is jealous and adversarial towards Jenny, as she is towards so many in her life:

“She’s sitting there as though she’s just laid an egg.”

Apparently this novel took Tonks four weeks to write, with the plan of making ‘a lot of red-hot money’. While I didn’t think it was truly stream-of-consciousness as some reviews describe, I did think the somewhat plotless style wasn’t particularly suited to huge mainstream success.

For the length of a novella, I enjoyed Min’s relentless defensiveness which resulted in witty, barbed comments.  The observations are astute and the use of imagery surprising (Tonks was an experimental poet.)

Had it been longer than 142 pages, I suspect my enjoyment of The Bloater would begin to wane. Min’s immaturity means she takes out her immense fear of reflection and rejection on everyone else, which is hard to stay with over too long a period. The characterisation all-round is thin, no-one really leaps off the page as fully realised person, perhaps reflecting Min’s self-focus and fears. However, I also think if the characters were better drawn, the bitterness of the humour would be harder to take, so perhaps this was an astute comic choice overall.

There’s no doubt Tonks was a highly skilled writer, and she didn’t make The Bloater longer, she kept it short.  So claiming I wouldn’t like a novel she didn’t write really is entirely unfair! I would absolutely read more by her on the basis of this novella.

“Ah, parking! The graveyard of so many good evenings.”

To end, not the Tonks recording but a poem performance with the BBC radiophonic Workshop from around the same time:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.7

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Last year for this project I read Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball, which made me keen to read more. Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) was her debut novel and already demonstrates what an accomplished stylist and storyteller she was.

Professor Clement Darrelhyde is at London Zoo watching two Hackenfeller’s apes, Percy and Edwina. The apes are thought to be the closest to humans, and Brophy draws her parallels with a light comic touch.

“In captivity it moved on all fours; but in the jungle, as Hackenfeller had noted, it ran erect with its hands holding onto branches overhead. Children sometimes used a similar method when they learn to walk, but in the adult man it was forgotten until he had to relearn it in crowded buses and trains.”

Both the Professor and Edwina hope for a mating to occur, but Percy is not obliging, despite the Professor’s ritual of singing Mozart to them.

“Here was an animal discontent with his monkeydom, already exercising the first characteristic of Man, which Man had never satisfactorily explained, self-restraint.”

Very quickly we learn that the Professor is under time pressure. An arrogant young researcher named Kendrick wants to send Percy to space in a rocket. The Professor is outraged, disparagingly drawing parallels in his mind between Kendrick and Rossini! He has only a few days to try and rescue Percy (although, keeping him in a cage is an odd kind of rescue).

“He looked like a scholastic grasshopper, crossing Regent’s Park and shattering its pastoral calm.”

The Professor undertakes interviews of comic misunderstanding with a journalist, and the inappropriately named Colonel Hunter at the League for the Prevention of Unkind Practises to Animals. Brophy has great fun satirising the press bias and well-meaning inactivity of organisations.

Eventually the Professor is aided by Gloria, a young pickpocket and burglar who, having been in prison, is up for setting Percy free.

But what does Percy want? Brophy takes us inside his mind in a way that works perfectly. It never seems clunky or whimsical, and she never sentimentalises Percy. I particularly enjoyed this reflection of his:

“Physically, he was exhausted. The Professor had not let him have his sleep out; and that at first seemed typical of the Professor’s nattering officiousness.”

The Professor and Gloria seemed doomed to failure and I couldn’t work out how Brophy would end this tale, but it is surprising and sensational, and she carries it off with aplomb.

I should warn readers there are some upsetting moments with the animals, but these are sentences not scenes. Brophy was a leading campaigner for animal rights and she knows how to make her points without didacticism or horror.

This really is an astonishing novel, finely balancing serious issues with comedy, philosophy with outright silliness.

Hackenfeller’s Ape has been reissued by Faber as one of their wonderful Editions series. More than 70 years after it was written, I’m sure it will resonate with a new generation of readers.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.3

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I hadn’t heard of Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter (1945, transl. Elizabeth Mayer, Marianne Moore 1945) before, despite the fact that according to the back cover, Thomas Mann called Stifter “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature”.  I picked it up because NYRB Classics always prove interesting, and this was no exception.

It opens with beautiful descriptions of its alpine setting:

“Among the high mountains of our country there is a little village with a small but needle-fine church-spire. Conspicuous above the green of abundant fruit trees, this spire—because the slates are painted vermilion—can be seen far and wide against the faint blue of the mountains.”

Rock Crystal is a Christmas story, and so the weather is very different:

“On the mountain, in winter, the two pinnacles called ‘horns’ are snow white and on clear days stand out in the dusky atmosphere with blinding brilliance; all the alpine meadows at the base of the summits are white then, as well as their sloping shoulders; even the precipitous rock faces or walls as the people call them, are coated with a white velvet nap of hoar-frost and glazed with ice tissue.”

And so the scene is exquisitely set for a fable, almost a fairytale. Certainly Rock Crystal’s central premise is a fairytale trope: two young children Conrad and Sanna, live in a village high in the Alps and walk through the forest to visit their grandparents in the valley.

They visit, collect their presents, and their grandmother warns them not to dawdle as they head back home. On the way home, the clear bright day changes rapidly with snow fall.

“There had descended upon everything a pervading sense of peace. Not the sound of a bird, although a few birds usually flit about in the woods even in winter, and the children on their way to Millsdorf that morning had heard them twitter.”

I thought the detail of the birds was so clever, horribly foreboding even as the children enjoy the snow.

Gradually the snow obliterates everything, so they lose their markers and without realising it walk onto a glacier.

“It was entirely dry, and they had smooth ice to walk on. But the whole cavern was blue, bluer than anything on earth, a blue deeper and finer than the vault of heaven itself, blue as azure glass with a faint light inside. There were massive ribs overhead, and more delicate ones, with pendant icicles, point lace, and tassels, the way leading further still—they knew not how far but they did not go on.”

Stifter places the reader alongside the children as they find some shelter as night falls and struggle not to fall asleep, knowing the dangers of doing so. I really couldn’t determine how this would work out.  

And so the story, beautifully told, becomes unbearably tense. The complete disorientation is vividly conveyed, and these two small children against the immensity of the environment seem utterly lost.

In the introduction, WH Auden amusingly observes that Stifter takes “breathtaking risks of appalling banalities” yet somehow avoids them all. Who am I to disagree?

Rock Crystal quietly evokes the power of love of family, of community, and of place. A truly memorable read.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.2

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

Stefan Zweig is a favourite writer of mine, I find him so insightful and compassionate. I also really like Pushkin Press Classics published in the smaller editions with the French flaps, so I was pleased to find just such a copy of his 1927 novella Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman (transl. Anthea Bell 2003).

It opens at a guesthouse on the French Riviera, “ten years before the war” with the unnamed first-person narrator remembering the arrival of an attractive single man who quickly absconds with Henriette, the wife of a manufacturer. Her absence causes quite a stir:

“Silently, one by one, as if put to shame by so shattering an emotional outburst, we crept back to our rooms, while that stricken specimen of mankind shook and sobbed alone with himself in the dark as the building slowly laid itself to rest, whispering, muttering, murmuring and sighing.”

The narrator takes a more liberal view of Henriette’s conduct, which puts him at odds with the other guests. I enjoyed Zweig’s gentle humour here:

“Well, it’s of no importance here to go back in every detail over the stormy course of an argument conducted between soup and dessert: only professionals of the table d’hôte are  witty, and points made in the heat of a chance dispute at table are usually banal, since the speakers resort to them clumsily and in haste.”

The narrator’s assertion that “I’d rather understand others than condemn them.” attracts the attention of Mrs. C, who from the way she’s initially described sounded easily in her nineties, but as it turns out is sixty-seven! She deliberately builds an intimacy with the narrator in order to tell her story, and he becomes the silent interlocutor to her tale.

“It is intolerable to spend one’s whole life staring at a single point in it.”

She describes how, at the age of forty-two, grieving her husband and with her sons fully grown, she arrived at Monte Carlo.

“I came there out of tedium, out of the painful emptiness of the heart that wells up like nausea, and at least tries to nourish itself on small external stimulations.”

She is not a seasoned gambler, but her husband enjoyed the casinos so she visits, and there becomes consumed by the vision of a young man compulsively placing bets.

“His face spoke the same fantastically extravagant language of extremes as the hands”

[…]

“A fear of something dreadful, something I had felt invisibly enveloping the young man like a miasma from the first moment.”

What follows is a character study of Mrs C and a portrait of addiction which is entirely believable. With his characteristic humanity, discernment and understanding, Zweig considers the supressed tragedies of people’s lives and how we continue to live.

Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman possibly felt more dramatic on initial publication – for twenty-first century readers nothing especially unpredictable takes place. But that is not to diminish it in any way. The evocation of strong feeling, and of trauma, is so sensitively realised that it remains a deeply affecting read.

This story has been filmed several times, including a made for television version with Ingrid Bergman. However, in its depiction of the glamour, seediness, seductions and betrayals of gambling, it also reminded me of a film I saw recently with lovely JacquiWIne, Bay of Angels: