« A YEAR IN READING 2007 | Main | "A HUNGER FOR BOOKS" »

December 10, 2007

Comments

Josephine Damian

Fantastic insights into Bellow's life, and lots of interesting "between the lines" stuff about his marriage and how it influenced his story lines.

Great post, Mark, and much congratualtions on your latest news!

Matt

Have you read the James Atlas biography? Up until the last third, where it gets really nasty, it's pretty good. (Martin Amis once called it a book-length inferiority complex, and in less vicious reviews many other people thought the same thing.) It really drives home how money-problems and women-problems plagued Bellow regardless of his success. (Bellow once remarked that Sweden should have made the check out directly to the divorce lawyers.)

TEV

Have not read it but will have to seek it out now. Thanks.

Bart Schneider

This was truly an elegant piece of posting. A lovely bit of curating given the manuscript page. It would be fun to read a letter or two of Bellow's, even without the manuscript, contemporary with the writing of the letters in Herzog. I like to imagine Bellow writing those letters. He had to be pacing. Could he possibly have written them sitting down?

Bart Schneider

This was truly an elegant piece of posting. A lovely bit of curating given the manuscript page. It would be fun to read a letter or two of Bellow's, even without the manuscript, contemporary with the writing of the letters in Herzog. I like to imagine Bellow writing those letters. He had to be pacing. Could he possibly have written them sitting down?

Rick Diguette

What a great letter! I was looking at a letter I received from Saul Bellow back in 1996, a full 40 years after the one above was written, and notice that he signed his name in exactly the same way. My letter won't fetch $1900, nor would I sell it even if it might. I was completely bowled over when a Nobel Prize Winner personally responded to what amounted to a fan letter.

The comments to this entry are closed.

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."