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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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November 20, 2007

MAGDA SZABO DIES

Publishers Lunch alerts us to the passing of Magda Szabo.

Szabo won Hungary's top literary award, the Kossuth Prize, in 1978. She died while reading at home in the eastern city of Debrecen where she was born, MTI said.

Szabo's works have been translated into German, French, English and many other languages. She was banned from publishing from 1949 under Hungary's communist dictator Matyas Rakosi and dismissed from her post in the education ministry.

The Door is Szabo's best known English work, reviewed here in the Guardian and here at Hungarian Literature Online.

Posted by TEV at 08:55 AM in Obit |

Comments

Shelley

Thanks a lot for linking to this. I've been horrified for years at how the reactionary (misogynist as well as racist) Martin Amis is celebrated as one of the leading lights of contemporary English literature. Of course he has many counterparts on the U.S. literary scene too.

Posted by: Shelley | November 20, 2007 at 09:04 AM

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