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July 17, 2006

TINTIN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE

The Guardian's review of Tintin and the Secret of Literature continues to whet our appetite for this title, which we understand is en route.  (That's always the way, isn't it?  A hundred titles sitting around that haven't been checked out yet and the one we're obssessed with is the one we don't have yet.)

The first question McCarthy poses has to do with Tintin's standing in literature: 'Should we, when we read the Tintin books, treat them with the reverence we would afford to Shakespeare, Dickens, Rabelais?' To which his answer is no. Although they create 'a huge social tableau ... managed with all the subtlety normally attributed to Jane Austen and Henry James' and 'a huge symbolic register worthy of a Bronte or a Faulkner', we should set them apart from literature. In the median space between drawing and writing, Herge, we are told, was achieving something entirely different.

One of the remarkable strengths of Tintin, McCarthy explains, is that 'within a simple medium for children is a mastery of plot and symbol, theme and subtext far superior to that displayed by most "real" novelists. If you want to be a writer,' he says, 'study The Castafiore Emerald' (his favourite of the series). 'It holds all of literature's formal keys, its trade secrets.'

Now that's an odd choice - we've always considered The Castafiore Emerald to be a real low point of the series, especially given its proximity to the vastly superrior The Calculus Affair.  But we're looking forward to devling more deeply into McCarthy's arguments and reporting back to you.

Posted at 12:18 AM in World Beat |

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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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