If I were to very crudely characterize this novella I would say it was a cross between Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and the movie Groundhog Day without the poignance of the West or the humor of the Bill Murray.*

I am a sucker for a story of rich folk travelling through Europe in general and Italy in particular. In A Sleep and a Forgetting William Dean Howells gives us an American travelling in Italy who finds himself enmeshed in the affairs of a rich American and his daughter who developed a serious case of short-term memory loss after witnessing the violent death of her mother. What’s not to like right? I am not sure but I found this one a bit of a slog. I think it may have something to do with what Frances refers to as the antiomniscient narrative.

The Verdict: I didn’t like this one very much because it was unhelpfully opaque. Frances, tell me does the doctor marry her in the end?

*For the record I really dislike Andie McDowell as an “actress” and I have never actually seen the movie.

I have already written about Adolphe in my review of Providence by Anita Brookner. It was a total coincidence that my TAOTN delivery arrived with Adolphe included just after I had finished reading the Brookner novel in which the protagonist leads a graduate school seminar in a close reading of the book.

Adolphe can be easily (and crudely) summarized thusly: For the first third of the book Adolphe seeks to win over the love of Ellénore. He spends the final two thirds trying to break up with her.
Like Tolstoy’s The Devil, I liked the straight forward storyteller-ish quality of this book. Unlike my experience with The Devil, my reflections on Adolphe were greatly enhanced by the discussion of it in the Brookner novel. It was almost as if I had been there for the discussion. Although Brookner’s characters are capable of a much more in-depth analysis of the text and its place in the Romantic tradition than little ol’ me. Plus they read it in its original French.

Since my experience of Adolphe was greatly influenced by the discussion in Providence, I will let Brookner flesh this out a bit.

‘…it is characteristic of the Romantic to reason endlessly in unbearable situations, and yet to remain bound by such situations…For the romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change.’

…the potency of this particular story comes from the juxtaposition of extremely dry language and extremely heated, almost uncontrollable sentiments…[T]here is a feeling that it is almost kept under lock and key, that even if the despair is total, the control remains.

…its terribly enfeebling message: that a man gets tired of a woman if she sacrifices everything for him, that such a woman will eventually die of her failure, and that the man will be poisoned by remorse for the rest of his life.

The Verdict: I liked Adolphe because it kept me in suspense as to how such a mind-f*** would end.

When Frances first wrote about her plan to read all 42 novellas in Melville Publishing House’s The Art of the Novella series in the month of August I thought she was crazy. I also hesitated taking up the challenge to read as many of them in August as possible because of my less than positive experience trying to read the 20 volumes that make up the Penguin English Journey series in April 2010. But then I thought “why not”? Which proves that fools don’t always rush in, sometimes they amble in. I am going to shoot for reviewing at least 20 of them this month. I must admit I read some of these back in July, but rather than recognize that as cheating, I see it as a testimony to the lure of the varied work that make up TAOTN series.

The Devil is the story of Yevgeny Irtenev, a rather virtuous and industrious young man who is bent on turning around his family’s debt-addled estates. But along the way he gets, well, horny. Before his marriage he meets regularly with a married peasant woman. He makes a seemingly happy marriage until his former mistress shows up one day as a cleaning woman in his house. This reawakens his interest in her and things don’t end well. Indeed not only do things end badly but Tolstoy gives the reader a choice of endings. Neither of them happy. Which ending you prefer no doubt says a lot about who you are.

The Verdict: I liked The Devil for its storyteller-ish quality.