My little old Grove Press paperback, translated by Lysander Kemp, is 123 pages, and that is with fairly wide line spacing, but the book has the reputation of the great Mexican novel.

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is such a novel. Sometimes these brief texts are even the fictional treatments of their historical subjects (American Puritanism for Hawthorne, modernist London for Woolf), yet they will fit in the back pocket as similarly epochal novels like Lost Illusions or Ulysses will not. Dalloway, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Morrison’s Sula, Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

While you might think that the shorter or short novel would mainly concern very particular moral problems or psychological experiences (and many examples come to mind, more examples than of the kind of book I am discussing, as in the short novels of James or Mansfield or Bellow, for instance), the short or shorter novel I am thinking of manifestly exhibits the world-describing or world-making power of bigger books with the additional ambition of compressing this power within a small compass: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Billy Budd, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Toomer’s Cane, Woolf’s Mrs. These novels often address themselves to generational time-scales, vast territories, communal experiences, or transpersonal institutions formally, they often incorporate multiple perspectives and conflicting voices. But I am also interested in a certain type of shorter novel, often even straddling the novella/novel boundary, that has the perhaps peculiar ambition of taking up the job of the big-canvas Balzacian or Dickensian novel (and behind it, the epic) in a much smaller space. You know the list: Bleak House, War and Peace, Middlemarch, The Magic Mountain, Underworld, etc. It sometimes seems as if great novels almost have to be long, where “great” implies success at the historico-political task of summing an epoch or capturing a society in fiction.

Pedro paramo by juan rulfo