The Porcupine (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Julian Barnes
- First Published: 1992
- Type of Work: Novella
- Time of Work: The 1990’s
- Setting: An unnamed Eastern European country
- Principal Characters: Stoyo Petkanov, Peter Solinsky, Maria Solinsky, Vera, Atanas, Stefan, Dimiter
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism, Novella
- Subjects: Freedom, Communism or communists, Politics, Socialism, Sex or sexuality, Trials, Truth, Greed, Faith, Democracy, 1990’s, Eastern Europe or eastern Europeans
- Locales: Europe
At slightly fewer than fifty thousand words, Julian Barnes’s latest work falls into that no-man’s land of fiction, the long short story or brief novel known as the novella. It is the form of some of the best fiction of the twentieth century—Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) come easily to mind—but it is a notoriously difficult hybrid. Lacking both the leisurely expansiveness of the novel and the pointed brevity of the short story, the novella often is dismissed as having the faults of both genres and the...
[The entire page is 2113 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
See Also
