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August 04, 2009

Comments

Niall

I think it more likely that in pathological fear of being judged preachy or trendy, he will so downplay/subvert/ironize the issue of global warming, that no one will realize that was what the novel was supposed to be about.

Juan Murillo

Even worse is the transparent symbolism he´s promising to deliver.

"He's sort of a planet" with "endless reforming assertions of future virtue that lead nowhere"

I don't know, allegory is so XIV century.

Hannah

A warning from James Wood:
"It is a problem for allegory that, while going about its allegorical business, it draws attention to itself. It is like someone who undresses in front of his window so that he can be seen by his neighbors. Allegory wants us to know that it is being allegorical. It is always saying: watch me, I mean something. I mean something; I am being allegorical. In this, it is very different from most fiction. (It resembles bad fiction.) Why does anyone tolerate it? In literature, we rarely do."
I'm trying to keep an open mind, but it's requiring a great deal of self-control. . .

Niall

Wood is wrong about allegory. The whole point of classical allegory is that it doesn't call attention to itself, because its conventions and meanings could be assumed on the part of the reader. Just as, say, the conventions of the cop-buddy movie in our day can just be assumed by the movie goer.

Allegory only "calls attention to itself" because it's no longer part of our culture. In that sense, Pindar's odes would "call attention to themselves" in our day.

Hannah

Well, there's allegory that calls attention to itself and then there's allegory done right (Melville, Kafka, Mann). It's tricky, especially in the contemporary fictional climate, to do allegory well, though. As you astutely point out, Niall, allegory all too easily becomes a sore thumb on the page. I wouldn't say McEwan is quite a modern-day Melville, but Melville's allegory "works" because it overcomes itself, outstrips itself, detonates itself as it treats monstrously complex issues. Surely I'm not being very eloquent or even clear, but I meant to notate the possibility for good allegory while asserting that most of it, today especially, fails.

Niall

The last literary allegory I read was Lolita. Which, I recall, wasn't half bad.

J M Scott

Too bad I hear so much angst from lefty zealots. Your real plaform is simply "everyone is entitled to their opinion, as long as it matches mine." (and by the way, the rightist zealots are equally cracked) Stop deluding yourselves. You're wannabe omniscients, and its become fatiguing to listen to this tripe ad infinitum.

C-

Thank you Mr. Scott. A more moderate, less zealous commentary than I have read in quite some time.

wonderclock

Lolita? Allegory? Nonsense. You need to look up the definition of the word.

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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."