Recent novellas prove shorter doesn’t mean lesser

What is a novella? No strict word or page count defines the form. Are novellas ever intended, or are they simply the by-product of a story that knows exactly how much space it deserves? There are great novellas – Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men – that you probably never realized were novellas. For the purposes of this column, I’ve drawn the line at roughly 150 pages – a threshold created entirely at my discretion.

Technology’s saturation in our lives is at the core of Ben Lerner’s subtly incisive Transcription. Structured as a triptych with a narrow middle section, it opens with our unnamed narrator, a magazine writer, travelling by train to Rhode Island to interview Thomas, a nonagenarian philosopher-filmmaker who was for years the narrator’s revered mentor.

Shortly after arriving at his hotel, however, the narrator drops his phone in the sink, disabling both it and his ability to record the interview. The loss goes beyond inconvenience – the narrator feels exposed, like he’s missing a limb (an anxiety that requires no explaining to modern readers).

At Thomas’s house, the narrator, for reasons that are unclear even to him, decides he can’t admit what happened and so pretends to record their conversation. Later on, he recreates from memory what will amount to Thomas’s final testament – a decision that will prove controversial when he delivers a speech at a museum after Thomas’s death.

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The book’s third part acts like a counterpoint to the first, with Thomas’s son, Max, relating to the narrator – a friend of old, and apparent rival for Thomas’s affections – how he and his wife overcame their young daughter’s eating disorder by allowing her to eat in front of that most insipid and inexplicable form of modern “entertainment”: unboxing videos.

In the same account, COVID-19 hits, Thomas is hospitalized, and Max, believing his father will die, delivers, by cellphone, forgiveness for his actions during a past family tragedy. But Thomas survives (for a time), leaving Max to wonder if his words were absorbed – or if, like the narrator’s lost recording, they were never captured in the first place.

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (originally published as Naufrage) is the French writer and philosopher’s first book to be translated into English. A nominee for both the Prix Goncourt and the International Booker Prize, it offers a fictional imagining of a terrible true event: the 2021 sinking of an inflatable dinghy in the English Channel that left 27 migrants dead near Calais. Like Transcription, the book is divided into three parts. The first is narrated by a French naval officer – a working single mother with all attendant pressures – who, on that fateful night, fields 13 increasingly frantic calls from the sinking migrants. After repeatedly demanding to know their co-ordinates so she can determine whether the migrants’ boat is in English or French waters, the officer eventually tells them, following several assurances that help is coming, that none will be. A brief but wrenching second section shifts to the migrants’ perspective before returning, in the third, to the officer, who continues to be aggressively questioned by a policewoman investigating the incident.

The legality of the officer’s actions is unclear – she insists emotional detachment is key to her job – but the policewoman, unusually, presses her to concede they were immoral. As the interrogation unfolds, the policewoman herself becomes increasingly difficult to place: she’s less an investigator than a figure bent on worrying at the officer’s conscience. The officer, meanwhile, keeps noting their physical similarities – their hair and gestures are uncannily alike – an echo that unsettles an increasingly unstable frame. Delecroix is less interested in resolving these ambiguities than in sustaining them, circling the uneasy boundary between private culpability and the responsibilities of the state.

Europe’s migration crisis is also there simmering in the background in Ivana Sajko’s Every Time We Say Goodbye. A follow-up to the Croatian playwright and theatre director’s previous novel, Love Novel, this one is, it must be said, unrelentingly grim, yet powerful in that grimness, packing a punch far beyond its 120 pages. In it, a train trip undertaken by Sajko’s unnamed male narrator from a small coastal town in the Balkans to Berlin, where he plans to restart his life, serves to unleash memories recent and distant.

The narrator is a journalist and activist whose acute sense of personal failure has curdled into despair, depression, and ennui. His chain-smoking girlfriend, fed up with his listlessness and writerly pretensions – all while he stares, days on end, at a blank page – has recently left him. Much like his life, he sees Europe as a failed enterprise: a place where aspirational notions of freedom, equality and sustainable economies have given way to an every-person-for-themselves siege mentality.

Like Marie-Claire Blais in her Soifs novels, Sajko writes in chapter-length sentences broken up only by commas. It takes a moment to register this, so fluid is the prose – the fluidity mirroring both the narrator’s stream of consciousness and the train’s forward motion. As we move toward a key revelation about the narrator’s childhood during the Balkan War, Sajko braids the personal and political into something both artful and quietly unsettling.

There are yet more trains, dead cellphones, unnamed narrators and thwarted writers in Maria Stepanova’s enchanting and surprisingly funny The Disappearing Act. Stepanova, a poet, essayist and prominent independent Russian voice whose In Memory of Memory earned multiple prize nominations, gives us M, a novelist who has left her homeland (guess which) in disgust after it invaded a neighbour it still has yet to fully conquer.

Drawing on the old literary device of withholding names, both M and the towns she moves through are reduced to initials, while Russia itself (ruled by “the beast,” who “had only just found its appetite and was far from being sated”) is left nameless until the very end. The effect of this is a persistent sense of dislocation, with the narrative tracking M – who no longer considers herself a novelist – as she seeks to shed her old identity (“as a key falls out of a pocket”) and assume a new one.

Events unfold with the illogic and frustrations of a dream. M had been on her way to a literary festival, but her connecting train is cancelled owing to a strike, leaving her happily stranded in a coastal town, where she finds the anonymity she so craves. She’s also drawn, with a quiet inevitability, to a local circus that – wouldn’t you know it – is in need of a troupe member willing to be sawed in half inside a glass and velvet sarcophagus. The first thing M (now “A”) does after making the decision to join them is abandon her now lifeless cellphone and her books – an arrangement that could suggest arrival or departure. Or something in between.

Editor’s note: Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Ivana Sajko’s previous novel. It is called Love Novel. This version has been corrected.