Novela/Nivola

Three innovative works that challenge novelistic conventions and blur the lines between characters and their author

The three remarkable pieces of fiction included in this volume are not so much novelas, novels, as nivolas, a form invented by Unamuno. Reflecting the author’s rejection of strict classification, nivolas have no plot; or rather, their plot is predestined but unknown to the author—it develops as it goes along, formulated by the characters themselves. The first nivola, Mist, anticipates by seven years Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. In it, the central character rebels, turning on Unamuno, his maker, and proclaiming that if he must die then so must his author. In the second nivola, Abel Sánchez, the story is told of Joaquin, who feverishly envies the unfairly favored Abel his easy fame and chance for immortality through his painting. The protagonist of the third nivola, How to Make a Novel, is fatally attracted to a book in which he reads: “When the reader comes to the end of this painful story he will die with me.”