Novellas in November is being hosted this year by Rebecca at BookishBeck and Cathy at 746Books. I try to participate each year – some years I manage to read more than others. The two I’ve read this year are both excellent, both translations, and very different from each other.
Manam by Rima Elkouri, translated by Phyllis Aronoff & Howard Scott (Mawenzi House)
I picked up Manam because of its showing as a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, an award that comes out around the same time as the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Awards.
Manam tells the story of the Armenian genocide that took place in 1915. After her Teta dies, Lea–a teacher in Montreal–travels overseas to learn more about her grandmother’s experience as a 7-year-old girl at the time. One hundred years after the Armenians were running to Syria for refuge, Syrians are running to Turkey for the same. “Now Aleppo is a city people flee. In my memories, it’s a city that welcomes.”
The Armenian genocide is a subject I’ve never read about before, so found it well worth the read. Beautifully told.
A genocide cuts fault lines through several generations. Even if the memory is never passed on through stories, the trauma can leave a mark. It survives forgetting. It survives silence. It survives the illusion that what is not told is not passed on.
School for Girls by Ariane Lessard, translated by Frances Pope (QC Fiction)
As with many of the books I’ve read by this publisher, School for Girls is slightly offbeat. (Which, for me, is a good thing!) The story is told through multiple narrators in short vignette-like chapters. Through their voices, we get a sense of the school, the teachers, and the personalities of many of the girls who live there.
As winter approaches–a time of year when the school is cut off from any comings and goings because of the severe weather–we begin to get a sense of something sinister going on. As the girls watch each other and form their own groups and alliances, there are many allusions to the “last girls”, and we get the feeling that not everyone necessarily makes it home from this place.
Some of the girls stand out more than others. Laure laughs to herself about her secrets, reminding me a little of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Diane can’t speak at all. Corinne is restless and does not want to be there; she believes if she were a boy she would still be at home with her brothers. Annette, who seems to be a bit younger, watches Ariandre closely. Ariandre likes to be the one watching, and spends a lot of her time alone writing down all her observations. She often seems to be on the verge of cracking.
A haunting novella that will cause some serious hesitation for anyone thinking of sending their child away to a boarding school.
She knows that the atmosphere of the place in winter changes you. Never had she felt so imprisoned, surrounded, watched, than in this place. She knows that between the bricks of the school, there creeps a sickness that no one is shielded from.
Have you been reading any novellas lately?
Consumed by Ink 
If you are interested in the Armenian genocide, you should read Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It is a big book, but it is really really good.
Thanks for the recommendation, Kay!
I think you’ll like it.
Stop it Naomi! My TBR pile is going to reach the ceiling soon because of you ❤
Music to my ears. 🙂
Very much like the sound of School for Girls
It’s a little gem of a book!
Thanks so much for participating! Novellas are so obligingly small that you can fit them in, even into a busy month. I’m also keen on School for Girls.
One of the reasons I love novellas! 🙂
I still have a hold on Foster and I think it’s in transit – I’m still hoping to read it!
I read Lolly Willowes JUST before Novellas in November, ha ha! I couldn’t wait! It was fantastic.
I’ll add that one to my list!
Wow School for Girls sounds seriously creepy. And when you mentioned that not everyone returns, it sort of reminded me of the horrors of residential schools for indigenous kids. Boarding school would be a big ‘no’ for our family that’s for sure…
Is boarding school even still a thing? I know I could never do it!
It does still exist, but is definitely not as popular!
I believe that I first learned about the Armenian genocide from that Atom Egoyan film (probably in your library collection, I think it’s a classic now) and this is definitely on my TBR too. And the haunting boarding school tale is already in my stacks: you’ve made me want to nudge it upwards now. I read three or four novellas for NovNov but didn’t write them up, only tagged them on Twitter (and with the wrong tag too! lol — I put ‘in’ between the Nov’s) and one was also a QC title, Prague: very striking!
Tagging them on Twitter is probably just as effective… normally… if you use the right hashtag. Lol
Hmm… I wonder if I have Prague in my stack. My stack is so big now, I can’t even remember what’s there!