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April 21, 2008

JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM

Needless to say, we disagree with Marilyn Stasio's bewildering take on The Silver Swan (which we thought even better than the excellent Christine Falls).  What's most confusing to admitted non-genre types like ourselves (and what follows is not an invitation to unleash the usual flame barrage) is this assertion:

Black has given himself plot headaches by meddling with some techniques of the trade he mastered so brilliantly in “Christine Falls.” Departing from the convention of allowing the reader to follow the story from the detective’s perspective, Black runs Quirke’s private investigation on a parallel track with the victim’s own story, told in intimate flashbacks.

Saints preserve us, such esoteric, outré literary devices!  As Ms. Stasio reaches for the reassuring comfort of The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, we ponder her closing:

But the conventions of crime fiction provide structural security for any exploratory attack on the subject of evil (or sin, as Black’s characters are more apt to define it), and failing to take full advantage of that freedom is like traveling all the way to Ireland and neglecting to visit either a church or a pub.

Now, we know that the whole ongoing clash between the so-called literary and the so-called genre is a touchy subject, tedious to most (including ourselves) and made increasingly irrelevant by efforts of the likes of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.  But it would seem to us that it's precisely this sort of slavish devotion to form that renders the form less interesting to those with more (yes) literary leanings.  Sure, we understand that there are rules, but we also understand that art routinely breaks rules in pursuit of greatness.  (Now, we're not even going to go near the whole "erotica" v. literary fiction thing, especially since Rupert Smith has it so, ahem ably in hand ... )

At any rate, we urge you to ignore Ms. Stasio's confining notions of what makes a good read and check out this wonderfully moody novel for yourself.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Words Fail |

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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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