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June 21, 2004

A NON-MEMOIR MEMOIR NON-DENIAL DENIAL

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (via the Baltimore Sun) takes a look at the new non-memoir by longtime Merchant/Ivory screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

In her brief “Apologia” prefacing “My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past,” Jhabvala calls the book “potentially autobiographical” and muses, “I may have been trying out alternative destinies.” More coy than cagey, Jhabvala declines to specify the degree to which the stories in this volume borrow directly from her own colorful young life.

But the stories are so inviting and alive, it would take a pedantic reader indeed to ask just how organic their ingredients are.

These absorbing tales feature cosmopolitan women chasing their destinies across continents and cultures in the mid-20th century. Arriving with, as one character puts it, “so much to confide, such an unspecified pressure on my heart,” these women are ripe for seduction. They fall for a charismatic felon, a rising political star, a gimcrack guru – not men with whom to live happily ever after. But Jhabvala’s characters narrate these romances from a distance of age, when time and life have sanded away the sharp edges of experience, leaving memories like smoothly gleaming stones.


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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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