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October 14, 2008

Comments

mary mccallum

Exquisite. I didn't notice the title, but after reading a single sentence I still knew where it came from. Unlike many books, Robinson's prose stays with me. Throughout Housekeeping she returns again again to images of light and dark, of windows, and water.

JW

This is a great way to start the day. A humble request: please post other passages from time to time that you feel appropriate. It helps, inspires and brings a sense of encouragement to a simple writer like myself. Thank you, TEV.

JW

My apologies. Obviously you are posting passages.

P.T. Smith

Thanks much for this. I read a review of her latest somewhat recentely, somewhere, and found it interesting, but not go out and get it interesting. This passage, a gorgeous passage, is getting it added to my long lists.

Mike

Beautiful passage. I agree with the others that request more once in a while.


Thanks,
Mike

LW

What a delight to see anything by Robinson, but espcially something from her first novel. It is set in Sandpoint, Idaho, where I lived in another lifetime and where my grandfather was born.

The Long Bridge that goes across Lake Pend Oreille is one of those sights that features both nature and manmade works to great advantage.

This is a huge, deep and wide lake that rarely freezes over, that has depths not quite charted where submarine training took place during WWII but where kids learned to ice skate for decades, even after the ice didn't need to be harvested during winter for summer use.

Robinson's writing is so on the mark. I'm delighted her latest novel is on the National Book Award list.

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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."