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November 16, 2007

TEV GIVEAWAY: A LIFE OF PICASSO, VOLS I & II

Ty_2This is a special one, folks.  For years now, we've been vocal in our admiration of John Richardson's magisterial series of Picasso biographies.  The long-awaited third volume, The Triumphant Years, is finally available, and even the difficult-to-please Michiko Kakutani was smitten:

Although this all makes for a more discursive and at times less focused narrative than that of Volume 2, “The Triumphant Years,” like its predecessors, is informed by Mr. Richardson’s consummate knowledge of Picasso’s work — his intimate understanding of the artist’s temperament and endlessly inventive styles, his expansive vocabulary of myths and motifs and, most important, the mysterious nature of the alchemy by which he transformed his own experiences and emotions into art. So incisive and revealing are Mr. Richardson’s commentaries on individual Picasso paintings and sculptures that the reader’s one serious complaint about this book is that photos of individual works discussed are not always included in this volume or do not appear on the same page on which they are so artfully deconstructed. Mr. Richardson leaves us not only with a deep appreciation of Picasso’s Promethean ambition and prodigious fecundity, but also with a shrewd understanding of his tumultuous, subversive and often disturbing art.

We don't have the new one for you - you'll have to go get that one yourselves - but we are very pleased, indeed, to be able to offer you a Double Giveaway this week, with special thanks to Knopf: One lucky winner will receive a copy of Volume I - The Prodigy - and Volume II - The Cubist Rebel - to a very lucky TEV reader.  You know the rules, folks - we'll take all email entries until 10 p.m. PST, subject line: "PLEADING FOR PABLO".  You must include your return MAILING address (not email, sorry) to qualify, because one of these days we really will start running the names of those who overlook this simple instruction.  Previous winners ineligible.  Then it's all in the hands of the Random Number Generator.  Until then, we leave you with our favorite Picasso, which we made a special stop at MoMA to see with Mrs. TEV during our last NY trip.

UPDATE: Congratulations to our winner Allison Berke of Cambridge, MA.

Picasso_demoiselles

Posted at 12:01 AM in Giveaways |

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Comments

Steven Augustine

I was always smitten by the one of Marie-Therese "dreaming" in that armchair...

Posted by: Steven Augustine | November 16, 2007 at 04:36 AM

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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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