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April 23, 2009

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Juan Marse has won the Cervantes Prize.  And the Orange Prize shortlist has been announced.

* The Christian Science Monitor proposes reinventing the Pulitzers.

Today, if the Pulitzers recognized excellence across a wider range of print and electronic content, they could help lift journalism once more.

* More forward thinking is displayed by the reliably thoughtful gang at The Millions, where Garth Risk Hallberg kicks off a series of posts on the future of book coverage.

* Tributes to JG Ballard continue to appear.  Granta offers remembrances from the likes of Hari Kunzru and Jonathan Lethem, and Salon weighs in with Simon Reynolds's far-reaching consideration.

But in death as in life, Ballard never quite got his full due as a thinker as well as a storyteller; he was a penetrating and endlessly provocative theorist about the intersections between culture and technology, media and desire. This tendency to think of him only as a fabulist is understandable to an extent, given that he never wrote a full-length book of nonfiction that condensed and focused his ideas. Instead his insights, speculations and polemical barbs are scattered across a panoply of reviews, columns, memoiristic essays, think pieces and single-topic commentaries written for or spoken to newspapers looking for the Ballardian take on some current event, issue or innovation.

* TEV favorite Luis Alberto Urrea describes life as an act of literary creation for NPR's This I Believe.

* Emory University is set to unveil the Alice Walker archives.

* CNET offers a list of five iPhone apps for writers.  (We would give our left RAM chip for an iPhone edition of the OED.)

* Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against author Jared Diamond.  There's really no end to the joke headline possibilities on this one, is there?

* The Best Israeli Novelist you've never heard of, at least according to The Jewish Week.

The same goes for most readers outside of Israel. In his home country, Shalev is mentioned in the same breath as David Grossman and Amos Oz, Israel’s two most renowned writers. And though his novels steadily appear in translations abroad (in over 20 languages no less), internationally he is still a lesser-known name. It is perhaps all the more surprising since his work has both literary cachet — dense as it is with biblical allusions and classic literary themes — and is also deliriously entertaining. Shalev, to put a finer point on it, is a funny writer.

* The Bookseller has the view from the London Book Fair - "Fewer people, more focus."

* The Columbia Spectator talks to William Gass.  (Thanks to Dave Lull.)

SPEC: Last fall Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the jury for the Nobel Prize in literature, told the Associated Press that “[t]he US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” These remarks caused quite a stir at the time (and were almost certainly dispiriting to the likes of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo). Do you think there’s any merit to Engdahl’s assessment? An do you think there’s something of imaginative value that stands to be gained when a writer grapples with the translation of thoughts and feelings from one language into another?

WG: We don’t translate enough.  That part is true.  But we are getting better.  And we don’t buy translations.  That indicates our provinciality.  But what people read in the U.S. and in Europe is mostly trash, and much of it is from the U.S.  American junk of all kinds is everywhere.  Significant American writers rushed to support, extol, and copy the Latin American boom.  But Latin Americans weren’t Europeans, who are the provincial ones here. We read Calvino, Kis, Sebald… etc.  French and other language departments went goofy over deconstruction, and made its import unwisely popular.  I founded and directed the International Writers Center at Washington University for a decade.  Incidentally, Robbe Grillet was on our faculty.  Philip Roth did wonderful things to support Polish etc. writers, and tackled Israeli issues in one of his greatest books.  Perhaps it is Europe who is insular.  Writers like Hawkes, and Coover lived or live part time in Europe.  You have to be aware of all of literature because local writing (that with only local interest; Faulkner is not local) is doomed to languish.

* Happy 50th birthday to The Elements of Style.

* And so we dance on, boats against the current ... The Great Gatsby as ballet.

* Daniel Olivas interviews Frances Dinkelspiel for the Jewish Journal.

* And, finally, the always excellent Michael Gorra gives AJ Liebling a well-deserved consideration over at The Smart Set.  (We've already ordered a copy of Between Meals on the strength of Gorra's recommendation.)

Posted at 11:59 AM in Marginalia |

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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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