What makes a novel a novel? The word comes from the Latin novus, meaning new, via the Italian novella storia, “new story”, so it can seem a contradiction in terms when someone protests that a book “is not a novel”. The very term suggests something original, unfamiliar – and yet one knows what the disappointed reader means. The parts don’t add up to a satisfying whole; the new story feels too disjointed or unfinished; the two or eight or 28 chapters don’t sufficiently cohere.
For many novelists, however, it’s precisely a traditional sense of continuity and completion that one simultaneously resists and pursues via novel means. One way writers have gone about this is by juxtaposing narratives whose plots have no apparent (or immediately apparent) intersecting points.
Philip Hensher wrote about such parallel narratives here in 2014, and while some of my own choices fit neatly into this category I have also selected examples of “parallelism” by other means, including within a single storyline. Of course, to be parallel in the purest sense, narratives mustn’t intersect or converge at all,
Source : theguardian
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