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April 16, 2004

BANVILLE ON ESZTERHAS

You know your obsessions are sufficiently out of control when other bloggers know them well enough to help feed them. Maud kindly e-mailed me a link to this review by John Banville of Joe Eszterhas' Hollywood Animal, which I missed in the course of my travels.

The gods do not die, they just change identities and move elsewhere. For the past 100 years or so they have been happily disporting themselves on a strip of coastline in southern California where the blue and gold light is the nearest substitute the New World can offer for the radiance of ancient Greece. They are as concupiscent, greedy and vengeful as ever and their pranks are as costly. These days they are not called Zeus or Hera, Dionysus or Athene, but Sharon, Leonardo, Nicole... and Joe.

If one were to identify a divine counterpart for the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas it would have to be Hephaestus, the volcanic wonder-worker of Olympus, whom my encyclopaedia describes as a "robust smith [read: wordsmith] with bearded face, powerful neck and hairy chest" under whose "graceless exterior, however, lurked a subtle and inventive spirit". Eszterhas, most notably the perpetrator of the scripts for Flashdance, Basic Instinct and Sliver, is or was the highest-paid writer in the history of Hollywood, a place so dismissive of his profession that it had become a gauge of the stupidity of starlets that they would imagine they might get into a picture by sleeping with the man who wrote it.

I'm telling you, I love this guy. John, not Joe. Thanks, Maud.

Posted at 12:17 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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