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February 27, 2004

BEEN THERE, BLOGGED THAT

The other day Ron wrote at length about James T. Farrell. Showing once again how far ahead of mainstream media we cliqueish bloggers are, here's the latest from the San Francisco Chronicle - on James T. Farrell no less!

James T. Farrell was born in obscurity on Feb. 27, 1904, and, notwithstanding Friday's centennial hiccup, will probably wind up where he started. The author of the "Studs Lonigan" trilogy and far too much else, Farrell had a literary career that climaxed almost immediately. Lots of novelists never surpass their first success, but Farrell may be the only one who peaked before finishing his first book.

All three of that novel's installments, "Young Lonigan," "The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan" and "Judgment Day," have just come out from the canon-keepers over at Library of America. Put this together with Robert K. Landers' mercifully definitive new biography, "An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell" (Encounter Books), and Farrell is now surely experiencing as much of a revival as he ever will. For anyone fascinated by the cruel calculus of literary reputation, Farrell's story makes for a harrowing read.


Posted at 12:27 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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