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February 05, 2008

O'BRIEN'S BEGGARED DELIGHT

John Updike weighs in with an appreciation of the novels of Flann O'Brien.

Graham Greene called “At Swim-Two-Birds” “one of the best books of our century. A book in a thousand . . . in the line of Ulysses and Tristram Shandy.” The Chicago Tribune said, more cagily, that it is “of such staggering originality that it baffles description and very nearly beggars our sense of delight.” All of O’Brien’s novels of nearly beggared delight convey what Donohue calls his “disdain for certain, clear meaning and interpretation.”

(Our boy Ruland beat Updike to it, by the by.)

Posted at 12:18 AM in Worthy Titles |

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Comments

Richard Nash

In an earlier incarnation of my life, I adapted all the Flann O'Brien (and Myles Na Gopaleen, the pseudonym under which he wrote his newspaper columns) into a one-man-show called Hair of the Dogma. Panned in Dublin, a huge success in, of all places, Berlin...

Posted by: Richard Nash | February 05, 2008 at 09:41 AM

James Marcus

All hail Flann O'Brien--but no, Jim Ruland didn't beat Updike to this one. There are two essays discussing O'Brien in "Hugging the Shore," published in the prehistorical mists of 1983.

Posted by: James Marcus | February 08, 2008 at 03:33 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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