« "THEY HAVE LITTLE CURIOSITY" | Main | THREE-MINUTE INTERVIEW (3MI) RETURNS: JESSE BALL AND THE NEW, IMPROVED 3MI »

February 17, 2009

Comments

ORS

Can I just rant about the New Yorker for a second???

I was so excited to see the Ian McEwan profile that, not wanting to wait for my next trip to the newsstand, I decided to purchase the online edition.

The credit card payment went through, but the website won't let me log in! I contacted their customer service, and have yet to receive a reply.

So bottom line: no Ian McEwan profile yet! Very disappointed in the New Yorker and thoroughly frustrated!

:(

John Fox

No, it's not just you thinking there's a lot about Rushdie/Fatwa. Videos, articles, and now a new book coming out -- I've felt swamped. I mean, I'm fascinated by it, admittedly, but you're right there's a surge.

JW

The Reader, as a film, works. Best picture, not sure. For my money, The Dark Knight deserves a place among the nominees.

Thank you for saying that about Life is Beautiful, though. My God. That film reeks of sappy, emotional manipulation. His Oscar performance solidified my opinion. With the film Defiance, some have called for an end to Holocaust films. I think that's a bit much - considering The Counterfeiters came out recently and blew me away.

Wendy

Oh, I hated The Reader as well - not only was the story horrible, but the writing was pure crap. I haven't seen the movie either - and won't - I also loved the Rosenbaum article and posted a link on my blog!

The comments to this entry are closed.

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."