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May 02, 2005

Comments

birnbaum

For health reasons I have long ago forsworn reading Laura Miller (not that I am of frail constitution and sensibility) but occasionally I will sample a lead paragraph of her work especially if I find the subject compelling. Having heard seriously good buzz on Nicole Krauss’s second book, I chanced to attempt Miller’s handling of it.

"It would be unfair to liken Nicole Krauss's second novel, ''The History of Love,'' to ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' the recently published second novel by her better-known husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, except for two things. The first is the deliberate and liberal sprinkling of correspondences between the two books, a system of coy marital cross-referencing that amounts to an engraved invitation to compare and contrast…"

That’s pure crap (forgive my grandiloquence)! The only exception at play is that Miller could attempt this likening, in what seems like unsubtle baiting to hook the reader into a review of a lesser known author by mentioning a well known and controversial one and perhaps a way to spank Foer one more time.

Too bad Ed Champion is off on some rock n roll bingeing (I guess you gotta do what ya gotta do) — as I must now wait for the universally acknowledged definitive assessment of NYTBR content.

Also, weren’t you meeting with Mr. NYTBR? Wha’ happened?

birnbaum

For health reasons I have long ago forsworn reading Laura Miller (not that I am of frail constitution and sensibility) but occasionally I will sample a lead paragraph of her work especially if I find the subject compelling. Having heard seriously good buzz on Nicole Krauss’s second book, I chanced to attempt Miller’s handling of it.

"It would be unfair to liken Nicole Krauss's second novel, ''The History of Love,'' to ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' the recently published second novel by her better-known husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, except for two things. The first is the deliberate and liberal sprinkling of correspondences between the two books, a system of coy marital cross-referencing that amounts to an engraved invitation to compare and contrast…"

That’s pure crap (forgive my grandiloquence)! The only exception at play is that Miller could attempt this likening, in what seems like unsubtle baiting to hook the reader into a review of a lesser known author by mentioning a well known and controversial one and perhaps a way to spank Foer one more time.

Too bad Ed Champion is off on some rock n roll bingeing (I guess you gotta do what ya gotta do) — as I must now wait for the universally acknowledged definitive assessment of NYTBR content.

Also, weren’t you meeting with Mr. NYTBR? Wha’ happened?

Anne

I suspect that the reason editors don't call out their reviewers for "lack[ing] the ability to select passages to quote that appropriately support their critical judgments" is because they're just so grateful to have moderately competent writers who remember to quote at all. It's no excuse--you're right to be harsh--but I imagine the editing all happening in some bleary stupor of simply checking for egregious errors, not an editing that deserves the name.

Alas, sad days for all of us...

Jim Lippard

"Now, correct us if we're wrong, but we've always heard from our scientist friends that you can't prove a theory false (you can't prove a negative) - you can only fail to prove it true"

That's wrong. First, Karl Popper's popular philosophy of science says the opposite--that you can't prove theories true, you can only disprove them. Second, in logic you can prove negatives. See, e.g.:

http://www.discord.org/~lippard/debiak.html

and

http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articles/proveanegative.html

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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."