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June 25, 2004

BURGESS SHRINE

Droogs rejoice! A shrine to Anthony Burgess is about to open, containing a "treasure trove of memorabilia including original manuscripts and personal artefacts."

Burgess wrote more than 30 novels, including Earthly Powers, the Enderby Series, and most famously, A Clockwork Orange.

He also penned screenplays and musical pieces, including three symphonies. The Anthony Burgess Foundation will be based in a three–storey Victorian house in Withington and is the only dedicated museum to the author in the UK. Liana has donated her late husband’s typewriter, writing desk, books from his library and personal gifts exchanged between the couple.

There will also be musical instruments, scores and hundreds of manuscripts on display.

In one of those fortuitous convergences that makes a blogger glad to be alive, TLS runs with Zinovy Zinik's reminiscences of a visit with Burgess.

Only a few minutes into our meeting, Burgess noted that the Russian word dom (home, house) originates from the Latin. I told him by way of reply that the English house sounds like chaos to a Russian ear. Could this possibly be the reason for the permanent sense of unease that Russians feel towards the Latin world, where the unattainable prototype of our home sweet home lies? Note also that the Russian golos, voice, goes back to the Greek. Thus, the Russians have neither a home nor a voice of their own. The split nature of the Russian mentality is not fortuitous and was originally caused by the schism between Eastern and Western Churches, in the sense that Russian Orthodox Christianity comes from Byzantium, while civilization has Western roots. (This is also the reason why Russia was inevitably left out of all the recent European Union rearrangements.) Yet any Englishman will tell you that such a state of fission is by no means unique or specific to Russia. Since the Normans invaded England, the language has been divided: the dish on the table has a French name (pork, say), while the livestock remains a plain old Anglo-Saxon pig.

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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

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    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

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    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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