« TEV GIVEAWAY: THE FARTHER SHORE | Main | MONDAY MORNING WOOD »

January 25, 2008

LOOKING BACK AT THE TRANSIT OF VENUS

As TEV regulars are well aware, we're admirers of Michael Gorra and we're admirers of The Transit of Venus, so what could be better than Michael Gorra on The Transit of Venus?

The Transit of Venus has a classic form—a distanced and authoritative narrative voice, a set of characters firmly rooted in social circumstance. George Eliot would have recognized it as a novel in her own tradition. I think it would have seemed old-fashioned in 1980, yet today that classicism makes it look both more enduring, and more up-to-date, than the “experimental” work of those years; a novelistic equivalent of Auden’s decision to write sonnets. My memory of the books that hit me hard becomes inseparable from my memory of the place in which I read them. I can still recall the uncomfortable chair in which I first opened Jane Austen, and with Hazzard I remember the daybed in the Madrid hotel where I started it, cracking my new Penguin and turning off the televised bullfights. I can see the library of the country inn in Cantabria where, unable to sleep, I finished it one groggy summer dawn.

Posted at 02:07 PM in Litlinks |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

genevieve

Now that will be good - filed that one away to read soon. Thanks Mark.

Posted by: genevieve | January 30, 2008 at 12:37 AM

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."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed