Do you enjoy ukulele music, the films of Wes Anderson or stick figure drawings? Have you ever made your own terrarium or scoured garage sales for knickknacks which look like they were owned by your great-grandmother? Then congratulations, you belong to the world of twee. But before you feel too proud of yourself, you're not the only one in history who has ever loved little, precious things. There's a proud literary tradition devoted to the quaintly small.
I'll start with a novel I don't actually like but just can't avoid. J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey gave birth to generations of writers and filmmakers who created characters so precocious they border on obnoxious. It's a must-read of the canon.
Although Salinger is fairly well-known, you'll have a harder time tracking down Robert Walser, one of those authors who needed to die before being truly appreciated. His novel The Tanners was republished in 2009, and although it's allegedly a story about a family of people with no clear goals in life, it's more or less a series of minute observations of character and setting. It spends a full page describing what it's like to walk behind a woman on the street, and it's the most adorable novel I've ever read.
And you can't be twee without being slightly surreal. Bruno Schulz probably belongs to magical realism, but his short stories and illustrations clearly have the light, airy tone perfect for any twee aficionado. At the end of one collection of stories, an old man literally floats away, and that's really all you need to know.
It just keeps on going from there, but in the meantime, put on your vintage glasses and enjoy.
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