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November 28, 2005

OBITER DICTA

We hope you hold a pleasant holiday and that you aren't too comatose from overeating to check out some of the links we've accumulated in the last few days:

* Yet another Houellebecq interview but we do so like the headline.

* The predictable end of year pieces are starting to pop up and this one at the Times follows the unimaginative template, clearly suggesting the year's primary literary story is whether you prefer Banville or McEwan.  The Guardian, on the other hand, continues to do this sort of thing much, much better.  Its end of the year list includes contributions from Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Simon Callow, AS Byatt and many, many others.

* The Globe and Mail looks at French language entries for the fall market.

* Tim Appelo contributes this nice long profile/Q&A on Jonathan Raban to the Seattle Weekly, in which he asks the question "How come the Great Seattle Writer is an Englishman? And how did he turn his snug aerie on North Queen Anne Hill into a bully pulpit to preach the gospel of good sense and good taste to the nations, via the most respected publications in New York and London (plus Seattle Weekly and Playboy) and a string of best-selling, award-winning, uncategorizable books that mix fiction, memoir, lit crit, political polemics, history, Northwest art history, anthropology, and travel writing into a chimera-style quite his own?"  Check out the piece to find out.

* The Ithaca Times has a (too) lengthy look at Nabokov's Ithaca years that relates what happens to you if you're the professor who has taken over VN's former quarters.

His ghost also pops up once in a while in Cornell professor Ken McClane's office. Goldwin Smith Hall 278 at Cornell once belonged to Nabokov, who was a professor of Russian literature. McClane, the W.E.B. Dubois Professor of English at Cornell, says visitors frequently ask to stop by, and he obliges. A sense of awe comes over the visitors, although no physical traces of Nabokov remain.
      "Often these admirers walk about the office - which is really just an office, full of books - mine - and artwork - mine - and painted the usual banal white," says McClane. "And yet the people come and ruminate. In fact, once or twice, visitors have been moved to tears."

* Stephan Clark has gone east to blog about Ukranian mail order brides and the results are ... well, let's just say that the divine, diverse tapestry of humanity once again leaves us speechless.

* Yeah, we know we always say how much we love TLS, but we're saying it again.  C'mon ... Burgess ... Bennett ... Gombrich ... Auster ... What's not to like?

* The Literary Saloon directs us to Andrew Wylie's thoughts on Google Print (among many other things - they're blogging up quite the storm while the rest of us lie fallow.)

* Dueling reviews have returned to The Reading Experience, where the latest title under consideration is E.L. Doctorow's The March.

Posted at 12:28 AM in Litlinks |

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WORTHY READINGS

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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