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September 27, 2005

OBITER DICTA

We were wined and dined for our birthday* by the lovely GOTEV, and so we've got a fistful of links we're passing along to you now.  We've begun to read the Ben Marcus essay in Harper's and might have some thoughts on that later.  Until then:

* Developments we don't especially care for: Literary-themed cookbooks.

* The Houston Chronicle takes a long look at the much-reviewed Wilson biography.

* Unsure what to read next?  Help is out there.

* Writing for the Business Standard, Nilanjana S Roy looks at the question of banned books, and calls for a banning of "anyone whose sentiments, religious or otherwise, are so excessively sensitive that they might be hurt by a book that they can always exercise the choice not to buy, or read, or even discuss."  We're down with that.

* Since we haven't mentioned John Banville since - what, yesterday? - we thought we'd alert you to his latest review in the Guardian of Charles Townshend's Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion.

* Over at ReadySteadyBook, first-rater Mark Thwaite advises us of the release of World Literature Today's list of Top 40 Most Important Works since 1927.  The list starts with To The Lighthouse (1927) and ends with Red Sorghum (1987).  To find out what's in between, you'll have to stop on over.

* There's a whole lotta Rushdie out there - from the Philly Inquirer to the Washington Post - but we're waiting for Laila's interview ...

* Everyone's a critic.  The San Jose Mercury News thinks Slow Man is a "fascinating flop."  And The New Yorker checks out On Beauty, finding it "less expansive than “White Teeth,” but more exalted than “The Autograph Man”—or “White Teeth."

* Wayne Yang has cranked the numbers on the "most prestigious literary magazines" by clocking Best American Short Stories appearances.

* We did not know that we shared a birthday with T.S. Eliot.  Gershwin, we knew.  Eliot we didn't.  But as it happened, we spent some of our recovery hours reading Yale University Press' truly excellent The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose, edited by Lawrence Rainey, and there it was right up front.  You are invited to draw your own conclusions.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Litlinks |

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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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