« UNVEILED | Main | COMICS, COMICS, COMICS »

March 17, 2009

Comments

Niall

The problem with how authors were chosen as "one hit wonders" is that they are only counting novels as possible "hits". This is absurd. Particularly when you take Boris Pasternak into account, whose poetry is a far superior literary achievement (at least in Russian) than the melodramatic potboiler Dr. Zhivago. Great writers often work in more than one literary form, and their "hits" shouldn't be arbitrarily circumscribed to one in the interests of constructing a listicle.

Ditto for Oscar Wilde. If you're not going to count The Importance of Being Earnest in his corner, then there's something crazy about your criteria in the first place.

And some would say that J.D. Salinger is in fact a no-hit wonder.

Dagger DiGorro

Does Virgil qualify as a one-hit wonder? How about Anthony Powell or Proust? Henry Adams? Milton?

Do the Eclogues and Georgics, The Fisher King, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Democracy, and Samson Agonistes count as hits? (Debate anmongst yourselves.)

Or is this just a stupid conversation?

(But in any case, Jonathan Franzen . . . that schmuck is definitely a one-hit wonder.)

Dagger DiGorro

And JR doesn't qualify as a Spectacular Second? The Sun Also Rises? Ummm . . . Madame Bovary?

DenverScribe

What about Homer? The Odyssey inspired Joyce's Ulysses which made the list. Proust and Milton I would definitely have as one-hit wonders, but when the one hit is amongst the greatest in the canon, one-hit wonder isn't really applicable. Besides, In Search of Lost Time is more a cycle of several works. More: Cervantes, Herodotus.

Niall

I don't think Homer ever copyrighted his work, so the Iliad may not count.

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."