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March 31, 2005

YOU MEAN THERE ARE TWO LITERARY TITLES OUT THERE AT THE SAME TIME??? IS THAT ALLOWED?

These days it seems like the only literary news out there (if Google Alerts are to be believed) is that Ian McEwan has a best-selling new novel out.  However, we're starting to detect the early signs of a shift as McEwan runs his course, and the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel becomes the only literary story anyone bothers covering.  (Unless, of course, you're obsessed with Jonathan Safran Foer.)

In The Remains of The Day (1989), his Booker-winning novel about an English butler whose master dabbles in fascism, the polish on the silver cheers up a visiting cabinet minister enough to make him sit down for talks with an ambassador from Nazi Germany. In When We Were Orphans (2000), a tear in his kimono sleeve makes Akira, a Japanese boy happily living in China, fear that he'll be sent back to his native country for not being Japanese enough. (For Never Let Me Go's Tommy, his body is the garment that must be treated properly, and a small cut on his elbow makes him too scared to bend it for fear his whole arm will "unzip.") Born in Nagasaki, Japan, before moving to England at the age of five, Ishiguro has shown himself to be at home writing through the voices of people from either culture, and now, through Kathy H., giving him two entries on the short list of female voices convincingly evoked by men.

Posted at 12:15 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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