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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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« TEV EXCERPT: "SENSELESSNESS" - CHAPTER ONE | Main | CAKE OR DEATH »

August 08, 2008

TEV GIVEAWAY: SENSELESSNESS

Hcms You've read the excerpt, now win the book.  Not just one of you but five of you will have the chance to receive a signed copy of Senselessness, courtesy, once again, the folks at New Directions.  In case you missed yesterday's post, here's what Benjamin Lytal, writing for the Sun, had to say:

In many ways a black comedy, "Senselessness" is still a political book. Its angry confessional could be the work of an American writer in the vein of Philip Roth, whose character Mickey Sabbath comes to mind, but Mr. Moya's chief demons are political, not sexual. His narrator occasionally alludes to conquistadors, and we are reminded that the military murder of indigenous peoples is an old story in Guatemala and elsewhere. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that, although the Spanish outlawed novels in the New World, their highly unreliable chronicles were actually the first Latin-American fictions. These tales of blood, gore, and racial horror bear direct influence on contemporary writers such as Bolaño and Mr. Moya, who so inevitably put confused chroniclers at the heart of their books.

And here's Oscar Villalon, writing for NPR's Books We Like:

There's a bracing pessimism coursing throughout Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness. Like a world-weary private investigator setting his rich client straight, the novel confronts one of the comfortable West's cherished beliefs: namely, that societies affected by mayhem will somehow, in the end, be all right. Through his speeding, stylized prose, translated by Katherine Silver, Castellanos Moya disabuses us of such hope.

So, you want one of the five autographed copies, you know what to do:  Drop us a line, subject line "NOT RIGHT IN THE HEAD".  Please include your full mailing address, as always, as ever.  Previous winners may enter this one, since there are five on offer.  We'll take all the entries until 8 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will do that voodoo it does so well.  More anon.

UPDATE: Even the simplest tasks become difficult when moving, hence the delay here.  Congrats go out to Michael Torsell, Susan Perry, Sean Cooper, Stephen Lovely and Russ Marshalek.

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Giveaways |

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