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.

Brrrr. I could feel the cold seeping into my bones as I read this book. It wasn’t just the cold of the New England winter, but the sense of a lack of life, a lack of vibrancy in the eponymous character and his household.

The pages in my copy are marked (in pencil of course) all the way through, to highlight wonderfully-crafted sentences. Such as:

And this:

This sentence made me smile, because it reminded me of a blues song. Compare and contrast:

Interestingly, I find these two extracts similar in structure, but not in the effect they have on me. From a structural point of view, there is a nice balance which is similar in both cases:

• sickness and trouble…

• hard luck and trouble…

But the first generates a feeling of, not so much depression, but the atmosphere of a dreary, damp, Sunday evening in November, while the second just makes me laugh. (Not because of schadenfreude, but because of the poor grammar and exaggerated circumstances depicted in blues songs like this.)

I wasn’t sure about the framing device, which involved starting and ending with an objective narrator in the present, and in the middle telling the story as it happened 25 years ago, pieced together from clues the nameless narrator discovered or pieced together with the stories he’d heard when he stayed the night at Frome’s place. Although, as the introduction to this edition points out, it was a clever way of allowing the author to have two separate viewpoints.

The story isn’t dramatic in the same way as, say, Giovanni’s Room is, but it gripped me just the same. A very enjoyable read.

Thanks to Deborah Norton for questioning a couple of assumptions I’d (almost certainly incorrectly) made about the narrator’s gender and how he arrived at the truth of Frome’s story.