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July 21, 2004

PICO IYER PROFILED

The National Post chats with Pico Iyer (who recently penned the introduction of the My California anthology we've promoted so breathlessly).

"Bolivia," Iyer writes, "stands apart from all your theories and ideas, much as the Indian women, with their boxes of Windows 98 and books by the Dalai Lama, sit apart from the future that saunters past them in the street."

Like so many passages in the book, this market scene displays both Iyer's razor-sharp sense of irony and his careful and subtle knack for bringing it to the reader. And his skill is especially felt when he finds himself in particularly grey areas of the world: at the frontier between privilege and poverty, of tradition and progress, or of the past and future.

Maybe most compelling, and certainly most unsettling, is Iyer's account of the sprawling Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. Sown with landmines from the days of Pol Pot, Iyer's Angkor is haunted by contraband pedlars, amputees in broken wheelchairs and little girls with cataracts playing with monkeys on strings. With unforgiving sincerity, he writes, "Angkor was the shrill whine of cicada bells issuing from the trees, and the little girl who put a pink water-pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger."

Posted at 12:05 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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