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July 26, 2006

THE OTHER ONE, OBVIOUSLY

The Chronicle takes note of Hollywood's burgeoning interest in the novels of Elizabeth Taylor.

Taylor is far more of a phantom on this side of the Atlantic. She has no American publisher, and chains like Borders don't routinely stock her 12 novels or five short-story collections. However, even Taylor's out-of-print fiction can be hunted down in libraries and at used bookstores.

A preliminary search under her name on Amazon.com pulls up "Elizabeth Takes Off," an account of the other Elizabeth Taylor's struggle with weight gain and self-esteem, along with "Nibbles and Me," a memoir she wrote as a child about keeping her pet chipmunk out of mischief on movie sets.

But the fortunes of the writer whom Anne Tyler has compared to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen -- "soul sisters all," in Tyler's words -- are suddenly looking up. More than 30 years after Taylor's death, she's been discovered not just by Ozon, whose "The Real Life of Angel Deverell" will be out early next year, but also by American director Dan Ireland. His screen adaptation of Taylor's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" came out in this country first and has made close to $1 million. A British distributor picked it up at Cannes, and the movie will be released in England in the fall.

Posted at 12:07 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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