Readable in one sitting — and other issues

Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar is possibly the finest novella of recent times. Edgar Allan Poe caught the spirit best when he said it is a creation that is “readable in one sitting.” Ian McEwan calls it “the perfect form of prose fiction.” Not everyone agrees. Stephen King, who has written novellas himself has called it “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic.” Of late I have been picking up novellas by writers I haven’t read in fiction before. The novella isn’t a modern invention – it has existed since the 14th century when Bocaccio’s Decameron had stories within stories that were called novellas. But books like William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Jean Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, Marquez’s Clandestine in Chile, some of them extended essays, might qualify.