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March 07, 2005

HUNEVEN INTERVIEW

The gang over at LAist interviews Michelle Huneven, LA resident and author of Jamesland.

7. Many of your stories revolve around people trying to cope with having an illustrious and influential relative or ancestor -- is that a common Southern Californian trait, struggling with the history of this place?

I am very interested in the idea that we’re all just parts of huge patterns -- genetic, historical, cultural‹and that even things like our dreams and idiosyncratic irritabilities may have been passed down wordlessly yet effectively from our ancestors. That happens everywhere, of course, and many of us don't have illustrious or particularly influential ancestors. My own ancestors were restless, rebellious, and adventurous sorts who were also afflicted with depression and alcoholism -- thank God there were a number of strong, energetic women who added their input to the bloodstream. My ancestors tended to cut and run; I have a radical rabbi on one side who left a number of places because of his politics. On the other side, I have a whaling great grandfather who abandoned his family for the sea. All four grandparents moved cross country, to the orange groves of California, for a fresh start in life. You could say that I rode the tide of Western expansionism and California dreaming into town.

It's a good interview and she sounds like a smart, interesting author.  Guess it's time to check out Jamesland ...

Posted at 11:33 AM |

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Comments

daniel olivas

"jamesland" is brilliant...you have to read it!

Posted by: daniel olivas | March 07, 2005 at 06:18 PM

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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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