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October 24, 2003

WHERE DO I GET ME ONE OF THEM FINELY HAIRED BADGER BRUSHES?

The Duchess of Hazzard's hype train steams along as The Great Fire is reviewed in the Times.

Leith, a war-injured British officer, boards a decrepit train in 1947 to travel inland from a port in occupied Japan. All of life's departures are evoked in this very first paragraph; all departures, that is, specific to an era when they were likely to be made by railroad and when distance was almost as inexorable as time. (Ms. Hazzard, in her 70's, is always specific even when the events she relates are misty.)

"Now they were starting," she writes. "Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain."

The NBA is shaping up to be a two-dog race between her and Edward Jones' The Known World, with its uplifting tale of authorial perseverance and struggle - perhaps a corrective to those wild and wacky Brits and their Booker?

TEV is taking early predictions. First correct prediction will win ... something. Workin' on it.

UPDATE: Inspired by Maud Newton's kind link to my earlier Banville posting, above referenced prize will be a copy of Shroud, Banville's latest. Yes, I know he's Irish and we're talking about the National Book Award here (although he also reviewed Hazzard). I sorta delight in that kind of illogic. Remember - first timestamped correct predicition wins.

Posted at 11:17 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • 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."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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