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April 24, 2008

MAILBAG GOODIES

We know that everyone is long past feeling sorry for our dilemma of too many books.  Life sucks, poor guy, all those free books.  Yeah, it's hard to hurt, we know.  But they come and come and come, and though we seem to be making more and more trips to Goodwill, the piles are serious enough that Mrs. TEV periodically threatens us with various legal maneuvers. 

That said, every now and then a title comes through that catches our eye and, rather than going into the pile to be evaluated (which can lead to the pile to be separated and later prioritized) (which leads to another pile to be shelved), it actually goes to the head of the class and lands with a smack on our desk.  (Where it usually sits for several weeks as other titles crawl up over it.)  But with any luck, the desk titles get an early perusal which sometimes graduates to a full-fledged impromptu read, thus wreaking havoc with anything resembling a system around here.

Well, not one but two books hit the desk this week, both of a decidedly academic bent.  Now, "academic" isn't a dirty word around here (unless we're playing The Naughty Professor with Mrs. TEV) but our reading primetime is usually reserved for novels.  Still, never having properly studied literature in school (majoring indifferently in journalism), the anniversary edition of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press) caught our eye.  The preface to the anniversary edition finds Eagleton as entertaining and pugnacious as ever, and writing with a clarity that holds the promise to make what is essentially a textbook an engrossing read.  It will be accompanying us on our book tour travels, mostly so we'll look smart sitting on Southwest.

On the other hand, we are getting right into Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal (Yale), a slender volume drawing on Thomas Mann's idea of "the quintessence of a civilized world" which is "the sole corrective for human history."  Riemen's elegant introduction movingly sets the stage for this post 9/11 consideration and chapter exhortations like "Be Brave" have already pulled us in.  Given MOTEV's devotion to Mann (forcing Death in Venice on us at a tender age and The Magic Mountain at a later one), and given the sad state of the world, it seems we could do far worse than to contemplate some nobility of the spirit.  We'll check back and let you know if the book's promise is fulfilled.

Posted at 12:24 AM in Worthy Titles |

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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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