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December 17, 2004

THE GAME REMAINS AFOOT

Given that we've recently evinced our interest in things Holmesian, we direct you to Brendan Wolfe's review of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes for January Magazine.

There is, as I said, much to love here, but Klinger's take on such adventures is insistently fundamentalist. Because everything must have really happened, he has no time for questions like, Why the Encyclopedia Britannica? Was Conan Doyle making a sly critique of English public education? Of course not. Conan Doyle didn't write the story! Instead, in what amounts to a parody of literary criticism, Klinger introduces us to someone called Thomas L. Stix, who has calculated that Jabez Wilson must have copied out 6,419,616 words in eight weeks, laboring just four hours per day. Assuming the facts of the story, this works out to a brisk 33,435 words per hour.

Sounds like we'll stick with our well worn Baring-Gould.  (Elswhere in the magazine, Wolfe also takes on Aharon Appelfeld's memoir.)

Posted at 12:18 AM |

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Comments

Scott

If all things Holmesian is what you're alookin for, you would do well to pick up the 12/13/04 issue of The New Yorker. There's a great story about the death (murder? suidice?) of Richard Green, quite possibly the biggest Sherlock Holmes fan ever.

You see, a large batch of Arthur Conan Doyle's letters and writings was to be donated to the British Library upon the death of one of Doyle's great grandaughters. However, when she died, the papers somehow ended up for auction. Green, a friend, went to investigate and subsequently ended up garroted in his apartment.

Posted by: Scott | December 17, 2004 at 09:34 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

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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.
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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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