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January 13, 2006

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Sometimes you've just got to wonder ...

Just the other day, Michiko Kakutani called Julian Barnes' Arthur and George "clumsy" as well as "serviceable but decidedly sluggish" ... Contrast that with this Sunday's NYTBR cover story (not yet available online), in which Terence Rafferty waxes rhapsodic about the same title, calling it "extraordinary" and "a deeply English novel, in the grand manner."  (Rafferty also provided a more reasoned counterweight to Kakutani's snarling review of The Sea.)

Given her propensity toward crankiness of late, don't you wonder if anyone at NYT raises an eyebrow or two over stuff like this?  Or do you think they encourage it?  It's one thing to disagree with Janet Maslin - we'd actually be likely to take Kakutani's side in that match up (which should give you a pretty clear idea of where we hold her in our esteem).  But Rafferty is a consistently smart reviewer, certainly far more thoughtful that MK's scorched earth reviewing style.  Is no one over there looking back and forth between the two and ... well .... you know, thinking ... Time to switch the nameplates?

Posted at 12:30 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

Judy Krueger

Maybe it is a New York thing. Be beligerent and don't agree with anyone. Since Ulin took over the LA Times Book Review, I now like it so much better than NYT, except that it is so SMALL.

Isn't somebody writing a chick lit novel about working for a NYT book reviewer?

Posted by: Judy Krueger | January 18, 2006 at 10:43 PM

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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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