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May 17, 2007

SUCH NACHES!

Los Angeles's most literary rabbi, David Wolpe, offers up his assessment of The Yiddish Policemen's Union as part of a monthly books column for the Jewish Journal:

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen of the Jewry, is a virtuoso of language speaking what Cynthia Ozick called for years ago -- a "new Yiddish." In other words, English inflected to the platzing point.

Chabon's sentences cry out for anthologizing: the night "has the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat"; the coffee machine "hawks and spits like a decrepit Jewish policeman after ten slights of steps." One man is described as "sober as a carp in a bathtub."

Chabon is not only writing about Yiddish, his metaphors have picked up a Yiddish flavor. He can still let fly with a more conventionally stinging description -- a group of girls is as "vehement and clannish as schools of philosophy" -- but he has basted his language in another world, and it comes out, well, geshmeckt.

All of which must surely be music to Chabon's ears, given his expressed intention (mentioned at his recent LAPL appearance) to bring the rhythms and music of Yiddish to English.

Posted at 02:42 PM in Worthy Titles |

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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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