“In a time when people everywhere tend to speak alike and live alike, I consider it my good fortune to be able to record, through my writing, a unique way of living and speaking that is being lost. And yet, the purpose of the art form that is the novella is not the documentation of a society, or a description of its life and its customs and rituals. To do that, a historian or an essayist would more than suffice. In fact, they would be more qualified to do it than a writer of fiction. The