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September 04, 2008

Paperback covers

The paperback of Matrimony has a different cover from the hardback. A new cover for the PB is pretty common these days, and Vintage, my paperback publisher, does it for most of their books. Thanks to the web, you can get oodles of feedback on the matter, and one book blog, which did a giveaway of MATRIMONY a couple of weeks ago, asked all entrants to weigh in as to which cover they liked better. Lots of strong opinions. The contest also led to an extended correspondence between one of my readers and me as to whether the women's shoes that appear on the PB cover would in fact have been worn by Mia. The reader went on at great length about what Mia looked like--what clothes she wore and other Mia-related sartorial and hygiene details. She had a clear and detailed (and accurate) physical sense of Mia, but when I asked her how she knew all this, she said, "Why, it's in the book."

Actually, it isn't. I know, because I wrote the book. Yes, Mia is described physically at various points in the novel, but not in the detail that this reader offered me. This, it seems to me, is what Hemingway meant by the tip of the iceberg. If you get your details right, the tip of the iceberg implies the whole iceberg. I think of Carver's "Cathedral" as an example of a story in which the physical details about the blind man are pretty sparing (he's blind, he smokes, he has a beard), but they're nonetheless rendered so specifically and the story is animated by such a distinct voice that, boy, do you have a clear picture of the blind man. It's not true of all of Carver's work (in his lesser stories, all you get is the tip of the iceberg without the whole iceberg implied), but the best of them--and I'd include "Cathedral" in that category--are worth reading over and over again.

Posted at 11:45 AM in Guest Bloggers |

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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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