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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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« LATBR THUMBNAIL® - AUGUST 14, 2005: THE "KNOCK US OVER WITH A FEATHER" EDITION | Main | THINGS TO DO IN BOSTON »

August 17, 2005

UPDATES & MAILBAG

OK, we've cleaned up the Recommended sidebar a bit, and we've added a new entry (we're pretty picky so it takes a lot to get up there).  Please do check out our thoughts on John Berger's latest book Here Is Where We Meet, finally available this month.

It also occurred to us that we get tons and tons of books - many of which we're quite enthusiastic about - but because we are so damned slow and overextended it can take us ridiculous amounts of time to get to them.  And so rather than let them languish in silence, we thought we'd share the contents of our mailbag with you every now and then when a title we're particularly excited about hits the doorstep. 

Yesterday, Ian the friendly neighborhood UPS guy dropped off a copy of Andrei Makine's latest The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme.  We've been trying to get a copy of this one for quite a while and had all but given up on getting one.  (How long have you been trying, you ask?  Well, the catalogue that shipped with the book contains a promo for his next novel already!)  But we've loved Makine since we first read Dreams of My Russian Summers (spending four hours in London's Berkeley Square, our head buried in its pages), and we're looking forward to getting to this one after we wrap up the last of our LBC reading.  Makine - Russian born, he writes in French - writes very much the sort of European novel that we've always responded strongly to - lovely language and always that hint of elegy running through his work.  Some might find him old-fashioned, but they find us old-fashioned, too.

Arcade, Makine's publishers, are promoting this book as the conclusion of a loose trilogy that begins with Dreams and is continued with Requiem for a Lost Empire.  Both are worth your while, and we hope to report favorably on the latest in a few weeks.

Also on the stoop and looking very promising is Yiyun Li's debut collection of short stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.  Li was the winner of The Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for First Fiction.  She's an Iowa grad and we confess we opened the book clinging to our usual preconceptions, which were swiftly dashed.  We only had time to read a few story openings, but every one of them grabbed us, and we've earmarked this one near the top of our TBR pile.

Finally, like many others, we've cracked open John Crawford's memoir The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, and we're finding it as riveting as everyone else.  We're generally not remotely interested in war memoirs but this one has pulled us in from its first chapter in a sandstorm, which he we gulped down in a breathless sitting.  Crawford - who was two credits shy of getting his college degree when he was called up for service - is clearly a writer to pay attention to.

OK, that's all from us today.  Lotsa shit to do.  Books to read.  Outta here.

Posted by TEV at 11:39 AM in Housekeeping |

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