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June 11, 2009

THE LONG READ

Two long pieces have our attention this week.  We've only begun both, but they seem promising so we bring them to your attention here.  First, there's Daniel Torday on "Fatalism in the stories of Edward P. Jones" ...

It’s a startling move in a straightforward realist narrative, not entirely unlike the moment in Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber,” when after about a dozen pages of mundane description of a rich man hunting, we’re suddenly thrust into the head of the lion that will maul Macomber to death. The narrative rules as they’ve been established appear suddenly to be broken; we’re given access to a new moment out of chronology and we can only assume that it’s for a particular reason; now it’s up to us as readers to figure out why we’ve gained that access. Where discussion of contemporary fiction tends to be increasingly polarized between the experimental and the traditional, the post-modern and whatever the post-modern’s opposite might be, the George Saunders/Aimee Bender/Ben Marcus fantastical aesthetic against the straightforward realism represented by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff or Richard Ford, Jones throws into chaos such distinctions. In particular, our reigning critic of record James Wood has drawn increasing ire for ostensibly favoring a more traditional aesthetic, however wrong-headed this reading of Wood’s perspicacious criticism may be; within a mostly formal, conventional narrative language and framework, Jones employs such unusual and precise narrative moves as to muddy any discussion that conforms to these kinds of reductionist dichotomies.

... and in The New Republic, Peter Green looks at the new Cavafy translations by Daniel Mendelsohn (about whih we promise, promise, promise to have more for you on soon):

Thus the recognition that Greece sought so long from the English-speaking West has been lavished on a poet who quietly opposed or undercut almost everything that Hellenizing propaganda stood for and continues to uphold today. Famous poets from Auden to Heaney have written about Cavafy, introduced his translations, and acknowledged his influence on their own work. The texts of Cavafy's unfinished poems, now translated by Mendelsohn for the first time, were pieced together from fragmentary successive drafts by the Italian scholar Renata Lavagnini, with the minute care--and the same technique--normally lavished only on the papyrus scraps of a major classical author, and their retrieval was hailed as a major literary discovery. If the Greeks, as is sometimes alleged, invented irony, this has to be an almost unrivalled example of it. What, we may well ask ourselves, has been the secret of this marginal Hellenist's astonishing and unprecedented success in the Anglo-American literary world?

Posted at 12:27 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

Cesar Bruto

I love P. Jones. That fatalist technique he borrowed from Marquez though.

Posted by: Cesar Bruto | June 11, 2009 at 10:24 AM

Penny

Traditional aesthetics, conservative narative rules, and lit theory to ponder. Yes, sounds like summer reading for late night, warm weather on the deck summer discussions. Thanks for posting the links to both articles, especially the Daniel Torday.

Posted by: Penny | June 16, 2009 at 08:59 AM

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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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