Reunion

"Although I reckon the character in it would have preferred to drink a couple of tankards of beer. It’s mostly set in 1932, in Stuttgart, and it’s about the friendship of two schoolboys. I think they’re about 13. Konradin and Hans. Konradin comes from an aristocratic German family and Hans is Jewish, so they are quite unlikely friends at first; both are loners at school, but they hook onto each other and share everything for a number of years. As a reader, you know what’s coming, because it’s set in the 1930s. But that is so beautifully underplayed. Konradin is invited to Hans’ house to meet his Jewish family, but Konradin’s parents do not invite Hans back. You understand so much more than the characters, and Uhlman handles that wonderfully. “As a reader, you know what’s coming. But that is so beautifully underplayed” Many years later, Hans is in America and he’s sent a letter from his old school in Germany asking to help raise funds for a memorial to the boys from the school who died during the war. Enclosed is a book of all the students who died, and how they died. Hans reads through it, but he avoids looking for his old friend. But at the end of the novella Hans decides to see what happened to Konradin. He has some assumptions, the reader has assumptions, but the very last line—when Hans reads what happened to his friend—turns all that on its head. It’s very clever. Very well handled and not sentimental. Very simple, very sharp, beautiful. Yes. It’s set in rural Wiltshire and it’s about twins Jeanie and Julius who are 51 and still live with their mother in a cottage. They have a market garden, so they make some money from growing vegetables but they live in rural isolation, and money is hard to come by. It’s a struggle, but this is their world. At the start of the book, their mother Dot dies and Jeanie and Julius have to learn to navigate society. Jeanie can barely read or write and they have very little access to technology, and have no transport. They’ve lived in this bubble for more than fifty years and now they face eviction. And all Jeanie wants is to get back to her cottage and the way of life she had with her brother. It has! I’m delighted. I also had one more thing to say about novellas! Well, apart from them being more engrossing than a short story, but more condensed than a novel, there’s also the possibility—although none of these five do it—of playing with language and structure, which is harder to do in a novel. In a novella, I think you can often get away with this. I’m thinking of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation . If you do what they do with a full length novel, I think readers might find it more difficult. So, you can have more experimental structures, because the ‘weight’ of the book is less likely to make it collapse in on itself."