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March 06, 2008

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* The Los Angeles Times offers up a nice roundup of memorable literary hoaxes.

* Salon is scarcely alone in anointing the late Alain Robbe-Grillet "the man who ruined the novel."

* A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes is mere weeks away from awarding New Zealand's richest literary prize.

The $65,000 Prize in Modern Letters will be announced on Saturday 15 March as part of New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week.

* Narrative Magazine is profiled in the Chronicle, which takes the Inexplicably Awful Headline of the Week prize.

* Megan McArdle with one theory on the appeal of memoirs, faux or otherwise.  (An appeal, we should point out, which more or less eludes us entirely; assuming we draw a distinction between, say, memoirs like John Richardson's The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the more confessional claptrap clogging bookstores these days.)

So for people who wouldn't be caught dead reading a bodice ripper, memoir fills that space. Having neatly separated fact and fiction, we now read only "fact" as a way to learn about correct behavior, where a hundred years ago people were perfectly accustomed to taking moral or social lessons out of obvious fiction (from whence the term "morality play"). Memoir alone do we permit ourselves to read for the (now conscious) purpose of obtaining information about how human beings behave in other situations than ours.

* Larkin's renaissance.

* A report on a reading of Ian McEwan's latest novel-in-progress.  The subject?  Climate change.  Which we hope he'll handle more deftly than he handled 9/11 and Iraq.

* Today's reason to move to Paris:  "A survey of global reading habits has revealed that we all fit nicely into our national stereotypes, with the French opting for morose highbrow tomes and the Americans for self help guides, while the British plump for trivia and books by celebrities."

* John Freeman reviews The Death of the Critic and finds much to praise.

But the thorniest reasons for this cutback, the ones that deal with internal fractures within criticism itself, are just now beginning to be addressed. In his provocative, enormously informative new book, "The Death of the Critic," Rónán McDonald dives into this territory with both sleeves rolled up. He traces the current suspicion of the critic's role to debates that have raged since Plato. Forget about bloggers, cut-rate publishers, and amazon.com (the usual suspects); the critic's killer, McDonald argues, is criticism itself.

* The only Obama/Clinton comparison that counts - who is the better writer?

Posted at 12:05 AM in Marginalia |

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Comments

EG

And here is why you won't be moving to Paris: dollar hits new low against euro, $1.51.

Posted by: EG | March 06, 2008 at 05:27 PM

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."

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