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July 20, 2007

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE IRRESPONSIBLE SELF ... TIMES TEN

IsDo you remember that scene in Grosse Point Blank, in which a stoned Jeremy Piven is aghast that it's been "TEN YEARS!  TEN YEARS!!!" since he's seen his good friend John Cusack?  Well, if we might borrow and modify his expression ... TEN COPIES!  TEN COPIES!!!  That's right - thanks to the generosity of the fine folks at Picador, we are thrilled to offer up ten giveaway copies of the paperback edition of James Wood's magnificent essay collection The Irresponsible Self, which contains criticism not included in the hardcover.  You can read an excerpt here.

Of course, this is such an unusual giveaway that we're going to ask you to work for it just a little bit.  The usual rules apply - drop us an email with the subject line "TEV GIVES ME WOOD" and include your full mailing address.  But you've also got to match the excerpts below to the books in question.  (Hint - you can find everything you need in our archives.)  If there are more then ten correct entries - which in the post-Google universe we expect there will be - then the Random Number Generator will serve its familiar role and anoint ten winners.  Here are your excerpts:

1) Vladimir Nabokov found it cruel, and never really reconciled himself to the novel. In a Tarantino-tainted age, when “reality” always seems to get the heavy sideburns of quotation marks, such violence seems less cruel than pointedly unreal, the guarantee of its unreality being the unkillability of its victims.

2) This is minstrelsy, pure and simple; it is an insult to Jewishness (the test of the insult is to imagine it written by a gentile; or imagine an equivalent piece of nonsense about an octogenarian African American – tap-dancing, say, or hysterically singing along to Marvin Gaye – written by a white writer).

3) Biblical style is famous for its stony reticence, for a mimesis that Erich Auerbach called ‘fraught with background’. This reticence is surely not as unique as Auerbach claimed – Herodotus is a great rationer of explanation, for example – but it achieves its best-known form in the family stories of Genesis.

4) But the cost of belonging to that army for whom the pen is mightier than the wrist (to adapt Housman) has been large, too. There have been twelve books since 1990, which means a book roughly every sixteen months. (Updike is well ahead, at twenty books since 1990, which corresponds to a book about every nine months or so.) The only way to conduct this kind of permanent revolution of print is to have the word factories ablaze all day and night, and to relish the inevitable duplication and mass production. Thus Updike repackages his writing by collecting his early stories, or by squeezing every last emission of his journalistic work into hardcovers, or by writing fiction that, figuratively speaking, repeats itself. (Villages, which appeared two years ago, is at times almost indistinguishable from at least four or five earlier fictions.)

5) ... Hugh is a Faulknerian monologist, who speaks a barbarous, spoiled poetry, sometimes weirdly funny and slangy and sometimes manically vatic and biblical, with frequent crescendos into capital letters. He is envious of his brother’s devotion to his art, and resentful of his own isolation: ‘Bald shiny shaven Butcher Bones said look at my works etc but nowhere did he confess Hugh Bones was his helper.’ But he also allows us to see Michael in greater complexity, and provides the provincial family history that might explain Michael’s criminality. His riffs are moving, twisted, and sometimes sublime in their sudden shifts. A remarkable reminiscence of his father’s hysterical attitude towards sand in the family car quickly mutates into the metaphysical, as sand becomes the sand in an hourglass and then the million grains of sand of eternity ...

A) Jesus and Yaweh
B) Theft
C) The History of Love
D) Don Quixote
E) The Five Books of Moses

We'll keep the lines open until 11:59 P.S.T. and announce the lucky ten on Saturday.  And whether or not you win, stop by Picador and show them a little love for their generosity.

UPDATE: Congratulations to the following ten TEV readers who knew (along with quite a few others) that the correct answers were 1D, 2C, 3E, 4A, 5B:  Lincoln Michel, Sebastian Stockman, Joshua Guthman, Andrew Carlson, Curtis Luciani, Antoine Wilson Benjamin Percy, Mauro Javier Cardenas, J.D. Daniels and Travis Kurowski.  Have a fine weekend, everyone.

Posted at 03:00 AM in Giveaways |

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Comments

MARGARETWilkins27

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Posted by: MARGARETWilkins27 | February 28, 2010 at 11:51 PM

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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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