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January 12, 2007

FRIDAY MARGINALIA

* Finalists for the third annual Story Prize have been announced.

* The novel that almost cost Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz his life has finally been published in book form in Egypt, four months after his death, and has become a best seller.

* The reclusive Harper Lee stepped out to see - and was photographed at - a school play.

* The Prague Post profiles translator Mark Corner, who is working to bring overlooked Czech writers to English readers.

Corner, however, is seeing to it that these overlooked Czech greats — Vančura, Poláček and Jirotka — are finally gaining a readership among Anglophones. His translation of Jirotka's Saturnin quickly sold out its first print run of 3,000 copies, and has inspired its publisher, Charles University's Karolinum Press, to launch translations in German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.

* Johnny Depp, set to star in the adaptation of JP Donleavy's The Ginger Man, was thrilled to meet the author.

* Robert Birnbaum and Heidi Julavits chat about "therapy, story templates, Freud as novelist, James Frey, Adam Phillips, the meaness of adolescent girls,Tim O Brien, Richard Ford, Edward P Jones, literary hoaxes, Andrew Leland, The Believer, Daniel Mendelsohn, "the horror of the Internet", literary journals, having more children and so on."

* And, finally, do check out Today in Letters, a delightful new blog that posts a daily literary letter or diary entry.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Marginalia |

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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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