The Elegant Variation:

« February 2004 | Main | April 2004 »

March 31, 2004

OK, THAT'S THREE - NOW CUT IT OUT

They're dropping like flies. Yesterday, it was Ustinov, today we lose two: John Sack, who wrote for Esquire, and French novelist Robert Merle. (At press time, the only thing running on Merle is the AP story. But if you have the French for it, there's a fine site here.)

UPDATE: Sarah reminisces about Sack, and makes me feel awful for being the bearer of bad news.

Posted at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

READER'S REPORT: BORGES

I've undertaken to read all Borges (the fiction and the non-fiction), and as I work my way through both the familar and the new, I'm startled and impressed all over again.

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind. He swore he would forget the enormous hallucination which had thrown him off at first, and he sought another method of work. Before putting it into execution, he spent a month recovering his strength, which had been squandered by his delirium. He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming and almost immediately succeeded in sleeping a reasonable part of each day. The few times that he had dreams during this period, he paid no attention to them. Before resuming his task, he waited until the moon's disk was perfect. Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshiped the planetary gods, pronounced the prescribed syllables of a mighty name, and went to sleep. He dreamed almost immediately, with his heart throbbing.

I've already threatened once to cobble up some of my own incoherent mutterings on the general fabulousness of Borges. That's still some time down the road, so entertain yourself until then with The Modern Word's excellent Borges site.

Posted at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

CRIME FICTION DATABASE

Now that Sarah's back we have no doubt she'll be all over this but it's too good for us not to pass on - a searchable database of crime fiction.

Crime Fiction Canada, a searchable database that covers crime fiction, film, and television from all over the world, is now available.
As reported in ResearchBuzz.com, Crime Fiction Canada offers users a number of resources covering the crime genre. Some of the features CFC offers are dissertations on crime fiction, criticisms of crime mystery, and detection on television.

Well, there's the rest of the day pretty much shot completely to hell.

Posted at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

BLITHE HOUSE QUARTERLY

Blithe House Quarterly, a new online site for gay short fiction is up and running.

Blithe House Quarterly: a site for gay short fiction URL: http://www.blithe.com/ AOL link: Blithe House Quarterly : a site for gay short fiction
"*The* journal, online or off, for gay short fiction. Blithe House Quarterly is one of the best literary sites on the Internet. Period." -- 42opus.com

** A GLAAD Media Award Nominee **

Blithe House Quarterly invites you to browse
its Spring 2004 edition (Volume 8, Number 2)

featuring

Sandra L. Beck
Stefanie Dunning
Drew Gummerson
Bethany Harvey
Trebor Healey
Reed Hearne
Martin Hyatt
Buzz Mauro
Dawn Paul
and Patrick Roscoe

edited by Diana Day and Jarrett Walker
executive editor and publisher: Aldo Alvarez

** Winner of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Internet Guide Award **

"Internet-based fiction journals have become a significant force in publishing, especially for serious short fiction. In Web-only lit journals such as Blithe House Quarterly, the short-story form is alive and clicking."
-- Baltimore City Paper

"Setting the quality bar [for gay and lesbian writing] is the phenomenal site Blithe House Quarterly. It's awash in awards and rightly so. Of all gay and lesbian sites, Blithe House is the golden child, the
one to be entered in the Literature Olympics. None of the stories needs special cosseting as our fiction. Be skeptical and go see the site!"
-- Gay & Lesbian On Line, 3rd Edition

"The central publishing arm of new queer fiction."
-- OUT Magazine on Blithe House Quarterly

Posted at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

BANGALORE BOOKS

Apparently, Bangalore is the place to be for the serious bibliophile.* Who knew?

It can take hours to go around the browsers to get an overall glimpse of what is on offer. But the greatest treat is the “out of print” corner where I am able to find authors whom I have not encountered in decades.
There sits, next to G K Chesterton, one of the favourite storytellers of my high school days: Nevil Shute, about whose gentle wartime stories I had until now only talked about to my children.

And, for the geographically challenged, here you go.

* Is "serious bibliophile" redundant? I imagine it probably is but we're letting it stand. This is just to let you know that I noticed.

Posted at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

IF ONLY WE KNEW "THE NEXT GENERATION" WELL ENOUGH TO MAKE A COLLECTIVE JOKE HERE.

The Independent Foreign Fiction prize shortlist has been announced, and the nominated books include one written by an Italian "collective".

The group, which comprises a postman, bouncer, librarian and social worker from Bologna and takes the name of a former Watford and England footballer as its pseudonym, caused a literary sensation last year when it became the first cooperative to write a bestseller in Italy.
The spy thriller Q, translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, is set during the Reformation in Italy and Germany and is a stunning epic of action, mystery and ideas. It was also nominated for the Guardian First Book award last year.

I'm just trying to imagine all the nightmares - writing, editing, contracts, negotiations, commissions. The horror.

Posted at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS BLOG

Ed offers up a statement of purpose, and it's already having a ripple effect. As for ourselves, we're pleased with Ed's kind mention, and we're thinking of ways to respond to his clarion call. We've toyed with doing more reviews, and Laila's latest posting on this subject has re-energized us.

The vision of what literary blogs can be and can do is still evolving, and the thread that unites all these ideas - from Ed's to Laila's to Dan's - is a dissatisfaction with the state of literary affairs and a feeling (however nascent and amorphous) that blogs can offer a powerful alternative vision.

OK, we're sold. Now, to quote Robert Redford in The Candidate, "What do we do now?"

Posted at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

March 30, 2004

THANKS, MAUD

This is the kind of stuff that makes us awfully happy to be alive ...

ON SEPTEMBER 15, IGNATIUS J. REILLY WROTE:
Dear Mrs Mandela
Your persistence is touching, and I am moved to help you. However, can you promise the following?
1. That you SINCERELY and FULLY REPENT of all your past misdeeds.
2. That you will find a decent authoritarian priest, one not afraid to name SCOURGING as a penance, and confess your sins to him.
3. That you will endeavor to SIN NO MORE.
4. That you will obtain and STUDY The Consolation of Philosophy by BOETHIUS.
If you can, then perhaps we can continue our business together. Nobody is beyond redemption, except perhaps Gonzalez (who will be dealt with shortly) and the Mongoloid Mancuso.

Yours in God Ignatius J. Reilly

Posted at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

UPDIKE WINS PEN

John Updike has won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Updike was cited for "The Early Stories," a compilation of short fiction from 1953-1975. He will receive $15,000.
"Story after story has that moment of a deftly-rendered revelation, subtle and astonishing, that honest recognition of who we are," PEN/Faulkner judge Elizabeth Strout said in a statement Monday.

Their own website does not appear to be updated yet but there's a nice roundup of the nominees. In the meantime, you can visit one of the ugliest web pages in the history of the Internet - albeit one that has a fair amount of Updike links for your perusal.

Posted at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

WE'VE GOT WOOD

It's always a happy day in the TEV household when there's some new James Wood to dig into. OGIC directed us to his latest review available via The New Republic, this one looking at John Le Carre's Absolute Friends. It's not a book we're remotely interested in reading, but we remain fans of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and the essay is worth reading for Wood's deconstruction of that book alone.

Le Carré can write very well. In the passage that precedes Leamas's encounter with the passport officer, he writes that "the airport reminded Leamas of the war: machines, half hidden in the fog, waiting patiently for their masters; the resonant voices and their echoes, the sudden shout and the incongruous clip of a girl's heels on a stone floor; the roar of an engine that might have been at your elbow." This is suggestive, and almost lyrically skewed.

Overall, he finds the works wanting (including Spy) but no one writes a thoughtful takedown quite like Wood.

Posted at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

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."

RECOMMENDED

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris' warm and funny debut novel is an antidote to the sneering likes of The Office and Max Barry's Company. Treating his characters with both affection and respect, Ferris takes us into a Chicago ad agency at the onset of the dot-bomb. Careers are in jeopardy, nerves are frayed and petty turf wars are fought. But there are bigger stakes in the balance, and Ferris' weirdly indeterminate point of view that's mostly first person plural, underscores the shared humanity of everyone who has ever had to sit behind a desk. It's a luminous, affecting debut and you can read the first chapter right here.
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.
The Paris Review Interviews, I by The Paris Review and Philip Gourevitch

Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.
The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio

The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
*Now in Paperback*

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
Ticknor by Sheila Heti

When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.
The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you and yes, we are recommending a Believer product. Twenty-three interviews (a third presented for the first time) pairing the likes of Zadie Smith with Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster, Edward P. Jones and ZZ Packer, and Adam Thirwell with Tom Stoppard make this collection a must-read. Lifted out of the context of some of the magazine's worst twee excesses, the interviews stand admirably on their own as largely thoughtful dialogues on craft. A handful of interviewers seem more interested in themselves than in their subjects but in the main this collection will prove irresistible to writers of any stripe - struggling or established - and to readers seeking a window into the creative process.
The Sea by John Banville

John Banville's latest novel returns him to the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time since 1989's The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, we find Banville in transition, moving from the icy, restrained narrators of The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud toward warmer climes. Max Morden has returned to the vacation spot of his youth as he grieves the death of his wife. Remembering his first, fatal love, Morden works to reconcile himself to his loss. Banville's trademark linguistic virtuosity is everpresent but some of the chilly control is relinquished and Max mourns and rages in ways that mark a new direction for Banville - and there's at least one great twist which you'll never see coming. Given the politicized nature of the British literary scene, Banville's shot at the prize might be hobbled by his controversial McEwan review but we're rooting for our longtime favorite to go all the way at last. UPDATE: Our man won!
Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.
Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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

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."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 31, 2004

OK, THAT'S THREE - NOW CUT IT OUT

READER'S REPORT: BORGES

CRIME FICTION DATABASE

BLITHE HOUSE QUARTERLY

BANGALORE BOOKS

IF ONLY WE KNEW "THE NEXT GENERATION" WELL ENOUGH TO MAKE A COLLECTIVE JOKE HERE.

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS BLOG

March 30, 2004

THANKS, MAUD

UPDIKE WINS PEN

WE'VE GOT WOOD

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 31, 2004

March 30, 2004

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism