SOURCE: “A Death in India,” in Washington Post Book World, March 27, 1988, p. 10.

In the following review, Seymour-Smith praises the structure and depth of Frozen Music.

There is some confusion about the nature of fictions that are too short to call novels but too long to call short stories. There are novellas, Novelle, novelettes—and even ŕecits, André Gide's invention. The novella, which we are used to from Boccaccio, was simply a short prose narrative. The Novelle, more self-consciously developed by Goethe at a time when the short story as known to us had hardly been conceived as a form, and then by other Germans such as Kleist and Storm, is more complex, but is often marked by an “unexpected turn” or a climax preceded by an outline masterly in its compactness (as may be seen in the best tales of the unjustly forgotten German writer Paul Heyse, who...