Short Novels, Feel Good Reads

Summer Book by Tove Jansson

The Moomin books would be what most people know her for, Jansson also wrote for adults.  The Summer Book is the best known and probably the most loved of these.

It’s presented as a novel but it’s in fact a series of stories built around the relationship of a grandmother and granddaughter.  And as the introduction by Esther Freud  (2003 edition) makes clear, they are based on Jansson’s own mother and niece.

Made up of short chapters, it’s set on the tiny island the family owns in the Baltic Sea.  It’s about being young and being old and being a bit naughty at both times of life.  It’s also about being creative with what’s a hand, about being resilient and building that quality in another and about how amongst the complexities of life one can find the simple things that are really important.

All this is achieved without being at all whimsical, prescriptive or message laden.  

Its effects on the reader are both subtle and long lasting.

Simply, it’s a really lovely book.

A Month in the Country by J L Carr

From the vantage of old age, a man looks back to the point in his past that his life started again. It’s 1920 and our narrator, damaged mentally by the war and a failed marriage, has landed the job of restoring a medieval mural which is located in the parish church of a small village in the North Riding of Yorkshire.  The stripping away of the whitewash and grime hiding it takes the month of August.

That’s the bare bones of the novella.  For all its brevity, just over a hundred pages, it feels a larger, more expansive book. 

A lot can happen in a month.

This being set in rural Yorkshire there are hints of James Herriot like humour to found, as well as a bit of Brief Encounter in situation with the vicar’s unhappy wife.  There is something so quintessentially British in the sometimes reticence, sometimes abruptness of the characters and the elegiac sense of a pastoral golden age that if only we could return to, we would be healed.   

Actually, to be honest, the second part of the sentence above is pretty universal.  

 Heartburn by Nora Ephron

The late Nora Ephron was best known as a screenwriter; When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and the screenplay as well for this, her only novel.

Heartburn is the, rather lightly, fictional accounting of the breakup of her marriage with famed Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, as in All the President’s Men (the Dustin Hoffman one not Robert Redford one).  Ephron recreates herself in the story as a cookery writer and as a result the novel, as an added bonus, is peppered with recipes.

I confess that a lot of the enjoyment I got out of reading this is, like Ephron, being from New York. It comes from sharing that kind of sarcastic humour.  Think Dorothy Parker meets Jackie Mason.

I even remembered the famous Kreplach Joke she tells in the book as one of my Dad’s infamous jokes at dinner time.  It’s how you told them Dad.

By rights a novel about the betrayal of trust and the breakdown of a marriage shouldn’t this funny.

But it is.  

I’m including following novella, even though it doesn’t quite fit the brief, only because I think: 

One; it is so well written and therefore,

Two; people should read this author more and

Three; when someone says they are about to read Catcher in the Rye I so want to say, “No, no, no, read this instead!”.

A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

Frankie is twelve, doesn’t fit in and is so desperate to belong that she has convinced herself that she’ll be accompanying her older brother on his honeymoon.

Unlike Summer Book and A Month in the Country, this one is perhaps not as optimistic overall.  That said, its many virtues more than compensate. One of which is to take you back to a certain point in adolescence and make you glad you are no longer that age.

There is a lot of resonance with To Kill a Mockingbird.  Frankie and Scout are motherless tomboys.  Both are set in small towns in the American South and both deal with, to greater and lesser degrees, race.  A Member of the Wedding was first published 1946 and Harper Lee’s book in 1960, so a pretty strong case for the influence of one on the other can be made.

One of differences between the two and one reason for the less optimistic tone of the former is that, in Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird has character that is a loving and involved father and the exemplar of a morally upright adult.

I suppose I should be really recommending Harper Lee instead but with her book coming in at around 300 pages depending on the edition, it doesn’t rightly qualify as a short read.