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November 22, 2005

ACTUALLY, IN THIS CASE, WE'D BE THRILLED WITH "AN EYE FOR A GOOD STORY"

Cranky Norman Lebrecht says something only barely comprehensible about writers and the Holocaust, the gist seeming to be something about being against unseemly profiting (which we're certainly down with) but apparently making exceptions for his own unseemly soapboxing.  Or something like that.  Really, once you read this, you'll see this is the best we could do.

Exploitation lies at the heart of Everything is Illuminated, book and film alike. Making what is essentially an entertainment, a evening's diversion, about a massacre of many innocents is not to be lightly undertaken. It requires more than just an eye for a good story or even a second-generation family connection. Author, film-maker or any other artist must think long and hard about motive before dabbling in dimensions of misery that defy imagination and are more than adequately chronicled by expert historians. There must be a credible justification, a reason that can be given before the courts of conscience, before an author sits down and makes a fine living out of other people's suffering.

Lawrence Langer says it better.  So does Adorno, for that matter.

Posted at 12:15 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

John Shannon

Thanks for the Langer link. I've read a lot on the Holocaust, but this was philosophically worthwhile (and so little is.)

Posted by: John Shannon | November 22, 2005 at 11:25 AM

Vanessa Place

But then there's Gass, who rightly notes that without the great accounts, which may or may not be historical, but which will be coated with the sorts of narratives that best suit fiction, the Holocaust will be forgotten as other devestations have been forgotten. So we need all our accountants.

Posted by: Vanessa Place | November 24, 2005 at 06:05 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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