The Elegant Variation: NOTA BENE: THE END OF SLEEP

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April 23, 2008

NOTA BENE: THE END OF SLEEP

"Fin looked in awe at the half-dozen lightly charcoaled cubes of meat before him. Each was plump with thick-grained gleaming juiciness. Fin tore off a palm-sized swatch of bread and wrapped it around the biggest chunk of meat. Hot, garlicky, juices fired into his mouth as he bit into it, and he could taste that pink tender flesh in the middle give up its structure to a delicious mulch. As he chewed, eyes closed, almost swooning with aromatic delight, he discovered that one side of the meat was hiding toasted sesame seeds.

Chewing for Fin was an activity that absorbed all his attention. (His father had once revealed to him, as if passing on a great secret, that mastication was the only part of the digestive process that could be consciously affected.) The meat was extraordinary - spicy, luscious, tender and suffused with the flavour of thyme. One of the great kebabs of all time. And Fin kept a close tally of such things."

- Rowan Somerville, The End of Sleep (coming in July from W.W. Norton)

Posted at 12:01 AM in Nota Bene | Permalink

Comments

You know, not to be picky, but there's a lack of poetry in there:

"Hot, garlicky, juices fired into his mouth as he bit into it"

The juices fired into in his mouth? Really? From a meat juice cannon, just like in a commercial for hot dogs? And when they fired, was it a steady steam? Or was it packetized like photons of juice light? Or was it really just an unnecessary analogy/anthropomorphism/metaphowhatever?

Posted by: Matt | April 23, 2008 at 06:30 AM

must beg to differ matt - have had many a kebab just like the one described and the description is dead on. the sensation when the pressure of your bite releases the juices really is "firing" ... making me hungry thinking about it!

Posted by: kebabguy | April 23, 2008 at 10:31 AM

Is this supposed to be an example of an elegant variation?

"that pink tender flesh in the middle give up its structure to a delicious mulch."

Posted by: EG | April 23, 2008 at 10:34 AM

I've got to agree with Matt. The passage does nothing for me. "Delicious" and "extraordinary" are exactly the kind of empty adjectives it's vital to avoid when describing a sensual experience, and "aromatic delight" simply isn't grammatically correct. The delight isn't aromatic, the meat is. I can usually forgive these kind of false notes if a passage has other things going for it, but here there are too many in too small a space to ignore. Though maybe I just like kebabs too much to let such treatment pass.

Posted by: Shya | April 23, 2008 at 11:26 AM

Jesus. Can someone explain this current obsession with precise documentation of the mundane? I'd take one intelligent, brilliantly maddening, yet overwrought story by Borges over twenty by an author who can vividly evoke the experience of noshing on a kebab.

Also, I think EG's comment with regard to the grammatically incorrect phrase "aromatic delight" is the perfect example of the worst sort of criticism, the kind rampant in workshops.

Regardless of how frustrated I am with value placed on empty evocation, I do think the passage quoted is decent. Who in the world (apart from robotic copy editors) reads anything so closely that the aesthetic value of a passage is marred by a slight grammatical error?

Kill yourself.

Posted by: Grant | April 23, 2008 at 12:25 PM

One might call it the Nabokovian obsession/accumulation of detail, minus the Nabokovian genius behind it.

Posted by: jh | April 23, 2008 at 02:42 PM

Hey, "aromatic delight" wasn't my comment. No workshopping for me.

Posted by: EG | April 23, 2008 at 05:51 PM

When did proper English grammar become the (disparaged) domain of workshop criticism? Yikes.

Posted by: Shya | April 23, 2008 at 07:59 PM

Sorry, EG! That's my mistake.

Shya, please kill yourself.

Thanks.

Posted by: Grant | April 24, 2008 at 06:11 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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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."

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
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April 23, 2008

NOTA BENE: THE END OF SLEEP

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 23, 2008

NOTA BENE: THE END OF SLEEP

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism