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February 09, 2009

ALL ABOUT ME

Melvyn Bragg persuasively argues against those who dismiss autobiographical fiction.

It is often thought that autobiography cannot reach into the core of fiction; that the author’s own direct experience is too limiting a factor. That only if you step wholly outside yourself can fiction be formed. But why not step inside yourself? The brain, we now know, is more complicated than the universe, and we are just at the beginning of the exploration of what happens in there. What better laboratory for fiction than the brain that writes it? The more I write fiction, the more I see it as the best way to get at the truth and the only reason for writing it. Autobiography can be a high road to that end.

Posted at 12:07 AM in On Writing |

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Comments

Marthe

The question seems not to be IF but HOW
to use autobiography. Take Alice Munro,
that master of writing out of her own
life.

Posted by: Marthe | February 09, 2009 at 05:24 AM

brian

The brain more complicated than the universe? I tend to think of myself as existing within the universe, an insignificant part of the whole. My brain, although very important to me, is even less grand. I love fiction and hold a few autobiographical gems very close to my heart; but I'd think twice before making such an extravagant claim and passing it off rather half-heartedly as everyday knowledge.

Posted by: brian | February 09, 2009 at 08:55 AM

Doug

A genius like Nabokov could transform autobiography in pure beauty. I read everything looking for something: poetry, which, like Mr. Banville said, can happen anywhere.

Posted by: Doug | February 09, 2009 at 08:01 PM

Rene

Lawrence Weschler used to teach a graduate writing course called "The Fiction of Nonfiction" and his philosophy was that all writing is a creation. In other words, there is no such thing as "nonfiction"...all writing is "made" by man or woman. It is not "reality" but rather a few words on paper that try to approach a truth that can never be reached.

Posted by: Rene | February 09, 2009 at 08:49 PM

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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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