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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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« WHERE WERE YOU? | Main | TEV GIVEAWAY: JAMES TIPTREE, JR. - THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALICE B. SHELDON »

February 14, 2008

BACK IN L.A.

We're back.  We're jet-lagged.  We're tired.  We're facing a terrifyingly overstuffed inbox and a mountainous pile of book deliveries to go through. 

But we're not cold any more.

All of which is to say that if you've sent an email and haven't heard back yet, please give us a few more days to get caught up.  And we'll shoot to have a few posts pop up here today as the day wears on.

As for NY, the biggest news was not the conference, nor the new wonderful friends we made.  Rather, it's that MOTEV has entered the 21st century with a laptop, internet access and her first email account.  Which means she can now read this blog.  Which means we can't say what we were planning to say about her driving, other than that the old maxim that the drive to the airport is more dangerous than any flight, which once comforted this nervous flier, never felt truer.

More anon.

Posted by TEV at 07:27 AM in Housekeeping |

Comments

Has anyone heard of a writer named Petru Popescu? I just read (slipped to me) his new novel being published by Simon & Schuster. It's called GIRL MARY -- wow! This one is going to get Mel back into rehab! Popescu, nervy, rewrites the bible, telling us that Mary of Nazareth was such a babe, that even Pontius Pilot had it for her.

Posted by: iris | February 14, 2008 at 10:55 PM

Next time you walk.

Posted by: MOTEV | February 15, 2008 at 12:44 PM

I'm going to be noticeably more circumspect about my comments from now on...

Posted by: Steven Augustine | February 16, 2008 at 10:05 AM

Post a comment

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  • Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

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    With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
  • Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

    Dictation

    "History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here

  • Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

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  • The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

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    David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
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    Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.
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THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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