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February 27, 2004

IT'S GREEK TO US

Greece Now interviews Dr. David Ricks of King's College, London on the subject of his Modern Greek Writing: An Anthology in English Translation - a subject about which we know absolutely nothing but are willing to learn. Suggestions?

What socio-political and historical course is traced out by the literature in the book? What do we learn about Greece from the collection?

The book attempts to trace, through the individual (and often individualistic) responses of writers since 1821, some sense of how poetry and prose have responded to (and indeed helped to create) certain moods in certain historical settings. It is easy for foreigners, who know the peaceful and prosperous Greece of today, to ignore the often-painful history behind this and also to be too little aware of the resources literature has to offer in unpropitious circumstances.

In another item, the same site reports that Greece's best loved author, Antonis Samarakis, has died.

State bullying is one of the threats in Samarakis’ stark-yet-lively literary world. His heroes are often poor, powerless or lonely individuals facing indifference. The writer-humanist was trained in social justice early. Born in Athens’ lowly Vathis Square in 1919, he says: “I had one teacher by my side, the streets”. The too-serious-looking boy addressed his parents as Adriana and Euripides, explored the city and absorbed neighbours’ woes and joys. He also witnessed people handcuffed and taken away by police, “suffering torture only for their ideology.”

Posted at 12:11 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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