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April 16, 2009

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Regular TEV readers will recall my enthusiasm for Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit (which still sits atop our Recommended sidebar).  The book has just been released in France, where it has been immediately taken up by Slate's Jacques Attali.  If you have the French for it, it's worth taking a look.

D'abord, c'est le titre qui m'a attiré: «Noblesse de l'Esprit». Dans la pile des livres reçus ce matin, je choisis les brèves épreuves d'un texte d'un auteur inconnu pour moi, Rob Riemen, un professeur hollandais, avec ce titre intriguant. Je l'ouvre, décidé à ne faire que le feuilleter, puis je lis, l'attention d'abord attirée par la brève préface de George Steiner, qui ne dit presque rien sur le texte qu'il préface (c'est mauvais signe) et beaucoup sur un thème qui l'obsède depuis toujours, comme il obsédait son maitre à penser, Thomas Mann: comment la société allemande, sommet de la culture européenne , a-t-elle pu enfanter le nazisme?

(Which, not to be coy or anything, is exactly how the book caught our attention, too.)

* An IT perspective on the Amazon brouhaha ...

* Maurice Druon, who won the Goncourt and fought in the Resistance, has died at 90.

* The Observer reports on the scene as the NY gliterati take in the Paris Review's spring bash.  Much fuss is made about Zadie Smith's dress.

* Jay Parini reports from the Key West Literary Festival in the Atlantic.

And so this year at the Key West Literary Seminar, now well into its third decade, some heavy hitters in the world of historical fiction met for something like pre-spring training. The likes of Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Matthiessen, Russell Banks, William Kennedy, Marilynne Robinson, and Barry Unsworth were joined by historians such as Eric Foner and David Nasaw to sit in the sun for a week or so and talk about making history.

* Fearful of repeating herself, Margaret Drabble announces her retirement from fiction.

* An argument for book review digressions (which namechecks some of our litblogging pals).

* Novel-Tees is in the business of creating T-shirts for establishments that only exist within the pages of novels.

Readers can sport the bright red Championship Vinyl T-shirt from the London record store in Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity," a high school jersey from the small town of Owl, N.D., in Chuck Klosterman's "Downtown Owl," or the Boston-based Kenzie & Gennaro Investigations from Dennis Lehane's novels, to name a few.

* Publisher George Braziller is offering a poem a day for National Poetry Month.  (Recommended.)

* Richard Price and T.C. Boyle have been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  (The full list is here.)

"I didn't know what it was all about, but my editor and agent thought it was important enough to pull me off the tour to go to the ceremony," Boyle said.

* And, finally, Hugh Laurie is a best-selling novelist in France.  There's no punchline.

"You have to realize Dr. House is a phenomenon here," François Verdoux, head of Sonatine books, told the Guardian newspaper.  "But, despite his incredible popularity, no one had the faintest idea Laurie had written a book. There was no risk involved here. It was a no-brainer."

Posted at 12:50 AM in Marginalia |

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Comments

Levi Stahl

One of my favorite aspects of book blogs is their freedom to do wander into the digressions that are discussed in that Guardian article, and which the Literary Saloon is complaining about. Having no specific assignment or duty to evaluate the book as a consumer product that someone might be considering buying, they can instead treat it in whatever fashion strikes them, be it close reading or wild digression. In that hands of a good writer, that's a recipe for great fun.

Posted by: Levi Stahl | April 16, 2009 at 05:59 AM

tim

much fuss is made abt zadie smith's dress? 1 sentence = much fuss?

Posted by: tim | April 16, 2009 at 06:37 AM

TEV

Was the outfit of anyone else even mentioned? Do you ever see the attire of male writers so assiduously (and mawkishly) noted?

Posted by: TEV | April 16, 2009 at 08:18 AM

Kim

I've probably just lived in LA for too long, but I think it's a hoot that they mentioned Smith's dress. I'm rooting for a red carpet next year.

Posted by: Kim | April 16, 2009 at 09:19 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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