20th Century Novel Characteristics Novels & Stories

For the first time, Cathedra had someone who didn't cringe every time she opened her mouth to speak. So this is what having a friend feels like, huh? Cathedra thought to herself. One lunch break, while waiting for Diane underneath the tree, Cathedra was scribbling a draft of her first novel in her notebook. The novel contained the scenes she saw in the storybook, back in her kindergarten days. Since that day at kindergarten, she didn't tell anyone what she saw in the storybooks anymore. The thought of seeing things that other people couldn't still terrified her but she tried hard not to think about it by avoiding any book she can see other than school books and textbooks.

The specific and particular history of people who had been present at large events and had not been the people the large events were usually said to be about. She read novels. The novels were harder to characterize. They were not genre novels and not literary novels in the specific and self-conscious way of novels that were aware of being literary. They were simply good novels, or what appeared, from the evidence of the way she held them, the specific and attentive quality of a woman who was genuinely inside a book rather than processing it, to be good novels. She had read one I recognized. She had read several I did not.

Without any performative grace. I sat there and looked at him across the small table and tried to reconcile the man in front of me with the one who had grabbed my wrist in the dark; the one who had taken what he wanted without asking. Both men existed in the same space. That was the part I couldn't quite understand. "What kind of literature?" "Nineteenth century mostly," I said. I hesitated, then added, "about women stuck in impossible situations." I spoke without tone. Without emotion. He was silent for a while.