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August 30, 2006

SAD NEWS

Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died.

Long established as one of the Middle East's finest and best-loved writers, and an ardent advocate of moderation and religious tolerance, Mahfouz's acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1988 brought him to international notice. But a wider readership came at a price: in 1994, an attacker inspired by a militant cleric's ruling that one of Mahfouz's novels was blasphemous stabbed the then-82-year-old writer as he left his Cairo home. The attack damaged the nerves leading to his right arm, effectively putting an end to his former practice of writing for hours in longhand.

Nevertheless, Mahfouz maintained a busy schedule well into his 90s. In his final years, he met with friends at Cairo's literary watering holes almost every evening while continuing to work during the day, dictating short stories, sometimes only a few paragraphs long, to a friend who would also read him the newspapers. His final major work, published in 2005, was a collection of stories about the afterlife, The Seventh Heaven. Speaking to the Associated Press at his 94th birthday celebration last December, Mahfouz explained that he wrote book "because I want to believe something good will happen to me after death."

Expect a well-deserved outpouring in the days ahead.  We've only read Palace Walk (and shame on us for that) but, like many others, we'll be making up for our shortcomings in the months ahead.

Posted at 08:10 AM in Obit |

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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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