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December 14, 2005

2005 NOTABLES: A LITTLE HELP FOR OUR FRIENDS

Hope_1 It's always a considerable relief when one's friends write well.  It prevents all sorts of awkward encounters, eyes averted, feeble excuses made.  As it happens, this year saw four FOTEVs bring their work into print and it's with the clean conscience of the righteous that we can happily recommend these titles to you, despite the personal connection.

All four of the books are debuts of a fashion - three are first published works, and the fourth launches a new house.  One couldn't expect to find two collections more different than Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Jim Ruland's Big Lonesome (despite Amazon's oddball pairing).  Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is an elegant, stripped down tale of Morrocan immigrants who - at considerable peril - seek new lives in Spain.  The collection is grounded in realism, clear-eyed, deceptively simple and deeply moving.

Lonesome_2 Big Lonesome features Ruland's distinctive gallery of oddballs, in stories that evoke Popeye, Dick Tracy and Clint Eastwood.  But despite the broad strokes the bright colors, there's nothing comic book-like to this collection, which steals up on you with its quiet, quirky nobility.  For all its exuberance, Big Lonesome resonates with a slightly cracked humanity.

Simplify_1 Tod Golderg's collection Simplify launches the Chicago-based Other Voices imprint, and it does so with style.  Goldberg has turned in a collection that's every bit as funny as his wicked blog would lead to you believe, but there's also a disturbing element of creepiness that gives this collection a sharp and sometimes startling edge.  The title story in particular will linger in memory.

Francis_4  If there's an affinity of sorts between Ruland and Goldberg, there are perhaps some parallels between Lalami and David Francis' debut novel The Great Inland Sea.  It's a spare, disturbing tale that criss-crosses the globe from Los Angeles to some of the more barren stretches of Australia.  Set in the equestrian world, Francis' disturbed narrator Day watches his mother die as a child, and then spends much of his adolescence chasing a willful jumper named Callie.  The book is at once dark and brooding, yet vivid and hopeful, and has us looking forward to Francis' next novel.

Yes, they're friends.  Fortunately, we've got friends who can write, and 2005 was a good year from them.  Check them out.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Reviews |

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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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