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August 27, 2007

A LITTLE WELL-EARNED R&R

We're going to enjoy the waning days of summer and more or less close up shop here until just after Labor Day.  We do have a backlog of interesting or amusing (or both) sites to pass along, so we'll pop by here daily and stick something up here so you'll have a reason to keep popping in, but the meat and potatoes will return after the holidays.  (Oh, we've finally cracked upon Old Filth and it's all that they're saying.  The perfect book with which to bid adieu to the summer.)

Today we direct you to check out The Smart Set, a new online magazine which has the good fortune to include a fine essay by MIchael Gorra on Florence and Henry James.

I’ve come to give a lecture on America’s Florence, on the 19th century colony of expatriates that clustered on the hill of Bellosguardo, a mile south of the Arno, with a particular focus on Henry James, who not only set some of his work in Florence but wrote a lot of it here as well. He began his first novel, Roderick Hudson, in a flat on Piazza Santa Maria Novello; the building’s ground floor now contains a gelateria, with what I’m told is housing for an NYU study abroad program on the floors above. He wrote “The Aspern Papers” in a villa on Bellosguardo itself. And The Portrait of a Lady got its start in a hotel overlooking the Ponte Vecchio, with a view across the river to a line of half-ruined old houses that he described as “battered and befouled… cracked and disjointed,” but so different from the brownstones of his Manhattan childhood as to “create their own standard of felicity.” Today they look felicitous enough on their own, some of the city’s most expensively rehabbed property.

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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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