The sight of a 600-page novel compared to a 100-page novella would elicit starkly different facial expressions if one were to also consider a packed schedule with a plethora of tasks lined up. While one might sweat and tremble a little to take up a commitment to read a long novel, it would be far more accommodating to stick to a novella. Now don’t get me wrong to consider everyone having an aversion towards big novels, for I still have hope that there are people with longer attention spans. But I’ll focus here more on the rise of the novella from being a rather overlooked format to gaining recognition in this age.
Reels and TikTok, especially BookTok, have a huge hand in lowering our attention spans collectively. We want content that is short, easy to digest, and qualitatively rich as well, so as not to feel that our time is being used up in unnecessary scrolls.
When a lecturer goes on to talk for more than 15 minutes without a slight break, students like me tend to go for a short doomscroll on Instagram till that boredom flees. The same generation would be at pains to decipher the long sentences of Tolstoy, multiplying that by approximately 15 lines on a page, per infinite pages… Isn’t that a lot? Novellas might only take one sitting to finish.
And really, novellas have been there for quite a long time now. So it’s not that they are new and weightless, but there are some excellent ones which are densely rich in their moral content. Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is the yin and yang of morality and human limits; Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ provides the absurdist view towards identity and work; and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ is a haven for symbolisms that embody the childlike spirit and the need to keep it alive. One gets to process many different emotions and perspectives by managing to read more novellas, almost like the scattered and microinformation media content we are exposed to but, obviously, more intellectually stimulating.
There are also contemporary writers who have a fulfilling collection of such written pieces. One is, of course, Claire Keegan, famous for her realistic societal novella ‘Small Things Like These’. It takes you through a short journey on exploitative yet secret activities that are happening around us; it tries to take away the veil that keeps underground functionaries protected.
And had it not been for my research on this topic, I wouldn’t have found out that the movie ‘The Comfort of Strangers’ (1990) is based on a novella by Ian McEwan of the same name. It is a gripping and eerie story that had me feeling anxious and uneasy towards foreign trips.
Additionally, novellas are practically and economically more efficient for self-publishing authors because they obviously take less time and have the potential to be more enriching in an increasingly fast-paced world. Writers can work diligently on each piece while balancing their lifestyles in a packed schedule already. They also support the emergence of small publishing houses that find novellas highly appealing due to shorter printing costs. What it points towards is a passage to maintain and preserve book reading for the future. Though shorter, it is still adapting to be relevant for the new age. In the long run of history, clearly novellas have made themselves a strong contender for the modern literature format that is being taken up by more people favourably.