A literature course called Great Novellas beckoned me. I enrolled on it in order to discover writers or works I had not encountered before, and to sample fine writing I might learn from in order to improve my craft. This was one of the books on that course.

Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t pick up the (fictitious) memoir of a 17 year-old girl. That’s one of the joys of doing a course like this (and one of the reasons I do them, of course): you discover writing you’d probably never come across and almost certainly wouldn’t go looking for.

I enjoyed this novella, which was published in 1954. The writing was very understated, with some beautiful descriptions and some grim humour.

The central character is definitely not someone you would want to upset. Her particular, and extremely intelligent, form of revenge is to take advantage of people’s foibles in order to cause them to make ultimately unwise decisions. I won’t say much more, as I’m not a plot-spoiler, except that I did predict a catastrophic event, and I find that disappointing.

Also disappointing was the discovery that the original translation had been bowdlerised. I’m half-minded to try and become multilingual in order to avoid this sort of thing, but that’s hardly a practical idea. I’ve written about translations here:

The Primary Duty Of A Translator