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January 21, 2004

PAUL WEST RESPONDS

The Ithaca News runs a lengthy profile on Paul West, whose The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg comes in from quite a shellacking by J.M. Coetzee's heroine Elizabeth Costello. I've been quite curious about how West was responding to the attention. Here, at last, is the answer.

It's not common for one novelist to refer so directly to another in his work, let alone construct a meeting of his fictional protagonist and that writer (an awkwardly comic scene in Coetzee's novel). Writing in The New York Review of Books, David Lodge, apparently interpreting Costello's feelings as Coetzee's own, called Coetzee's treatment "a startling transgression of literary protocol." Although unsure what to think at first, West came to a different conclusion. "I think he invented her to voice an opinion that he despised ... (She's) a sacrificial animal in that novel; she's carefully set up to be destroyed," he says. (Whatever Coetzee's intentions, the controversy has had the side benefit of increasing sales of West's novel and, indeed, the two books are linked on Amazon.com's Web site.)

"If you don't get into the nitty-gritty of this horrible stuff, then you are not sympathizing, empathizing with the people who went through it," West says. "I think literature has an obligation to do that." Of the perpetrators, he says, "(If) you close the gate on certain destructive forms of behavior, then you have failed your obligation as a novelist to be those people - in other words, you're not going to present a representative slice of human life and human horror if you don't do it."

Posted at 12:28 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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