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September 04, 2008

Comments

Reginald Harris

FYI: That's the opening line of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", not "Love/Cholera"

Joshua Henkin

Reginald--You're right, of course. Thanks for catching that; my brain is fried at the end of this long day. I've changed it.

Gwen Dawson

Interesting post, but this sentence has been translated from Spanish, so certain things are not the same in the original (such as the shortness of the word ice).

Gadi

I have that tingling sensation (peeved/automatic sympathy for the writer) of having one of my pet topics (The greatness of this first sentence) produced for the world to see by someone else. But then, a few other people have read this book as well, haven't they?
As for the shortness of the word ice, I never saw it as important, more as an helper to the the verb which comes before it, which is much more significant. And that verb (to discover) is also the one word which is translated differently, I always thought. The original verb in Spanish, "conocer" is more akin in my mind in this context to "to know" and I that is the crux for me - "to know ice" is a synonyn for knowing anything which our modern world takes for granted, but on a scale almost absurd.
Sorry if this is a bit long-winded, but again, you just used one of my favorite little rants.

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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."