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April 09, 2007

IN THE INDEPENDENT: LEVI, THOMSON

We're a bit run down this morning and evern more behind than usual on our reading (having begun On Chesil Beach, among others), so expect a larger-than-usual Tuesday Marginalia collection tomorrow.  Until then, these two stories from the Independent merit particular notice.  First, there's Primo Levi's biographer Ian Thomson on Levi's visit to London - which included a meeting with Philip Roth -  remembered twenty years later:

On a free morning he visited Gaia Servadio, the Italian writer and journalist, at her home in Belgravia. Philip Roth was a frequent visitor, and Gaia had arranged for Levi to meet the American novelist later that afternoon. Levi said he was intimidated by Roth's fabled wit and sarcasm. ("I've only read Portnoy's Complaint!" he protested to Gaia.) Yet Roth was another of Levi's devoted admirers and longed to meet him. In fact, Roth was to have an unexpected influence in helping Levi consolidate his reputation in America.

The two writers met at 39 Belgrave Square, the Italian Cultural Institute, where Levi was to talk later that evening. The contrast between the New Jersey-born Roth, tall and aristocratically thin, and the short and slight Levi, was striking. Levi was unprepared for what he found in Roth, who turned out to be an engagingly gentle man. Roth, for his part, found Levi surprisingly sociable. ("With some people you just unlock - and Levi was one of them," Roth told me in 1994.) Somehow Roth was able to break through Levi's customary reserve and, as they said goodbye, Levi told him: "You know, this has all come too late." Only with hindsight did Roth see a prophetic note in that remark.

And then, there's a review of the latest Rupert Thomson novel, Death of a Murderer.  The word "masterpiece" seems to be getting quite a workout this week ...

Forget J K Rowling, the true jewel in Bloomsbury's crown is Rupert Thomson. Over the past 20 years, Thomson has built up one of the most substantial bodies of work by any British novelist. His profile rises and falls partly by neglect, but partly (it seems) through deliberate design, as he tends to avoid writing journalism, limits media appearances and has spent much of his life based overseas. He is a critical favourite but he has yet to write that elusive "breakthrough novel", and whenever he has seemed on the verge of wider success, he has either left a long gap before his next book or returned with a novel that dampens the momentum of the one preceding it. His best novels to date, The Insult (1996) and The Book of Revelation (1999) were followed, respectively, with two of his most challenging, Soft (1998) and Divided Kingdom (2005). But none of this history matters as he has finally delivered his masterpiece, a novel so strong that it seems a foregone conclusion that Thomson will enjoy the commercial success and widespread acclaim he deserves.

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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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