Epistolary Novels

Arts & Literature
#1

Wikipedia defines it as:

  • A novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic “documents” such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use.*

I enjoy this narrative style because it has a kind of innate intimacy… or baka voyeour-like furtiveness :embarasslaff:

The ones I have enjoyed are :

  1. Dracula
  2. Daddy-Long-Legs
  3. Bridget Jones’s Diary

And most recent ones:

  1. The Hired Girl - one of my best reads in a long long time
  2. Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society

Have you ever read any such book? How do you like it?

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#2

Griffin and Sabine lang kaagad ang naisip ko.

this book was a bit of a thing nung nasa college ako.
though i do not believe na nabasa ko siya ever in its entirety because reasons.

but it came across as really cool back then.

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#3

What an interesting blurb:

And since each letter must be pulled from its own envelope, the reader has the delightful, forbidden sensation of reading someone else’s mail. Griffin & Sabine is like no other illustrated novel: appealing to the poet and artist in everyone and sure to inspire a renaissance in the fine art of letter-writing, it tells an extraordinary story in an extraordinary way.

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#4

I think I read the Guernsey novel too (tamad la itype ng buo) pero di ko na maalala ang kwento right now.

I enjoyed The Martian which was turned into a film but I haven’t watched it yet.

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#5

Period siya. WW2. A female writer corresponding with a group of island people who formed a reading club out of necessity.

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#6

I’ve read The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) by Goethe in the original as a requirement back in undergrad. It was interesting and earnest in its story telling- love triangle, unrequited love, suicide. I can’t say that I was fully engaged in reading it because it was required though :laugh: Maybe I need to rummage through my boxes and re-read it for leisure, and see how I find it now.