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September 17, 2009

REMEMBERING THE SHIPPING NEWS

My appreciation of The Shipping News, my contribution to the National Book Award's 60th anniversary book blog, can be found here.

It has been – astonishingly – fifteen years since I read the novel but its memory is undimmed (if bruised by a wan film adaptation by Lasse Hallström), its glorious set pieces still vivid before my eyes. There is the remarkable family house on Quoyle Point that he restores with the help of his steadfast aunt. There are his dispatches as he finds his way covering the shipping news for the local newspaper, the wonderfully named Gammy Bird. (Proulx is magnificent with names: Nutbeem, Jack Buggit, Billy Pretty, names I didn’t need to go back and look up.) There are the remarkable local characters Proulx deploys in Quoyle’s orbit. And, of course, there is Wavey Prowse, with whom Quoyle gradually rediscovers his capacity for love.

Posted at 01:12 PM in Worthy Titles |

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Comments

Niall

If you haven't read it already, you might really enjoy Penelope Fitzgerald's "The Blue Flower", a novel of similar delicacy and insight.

Posted by: Niall | September 18, 2009 at 08:25 AM

anna

She inspired my summer goals this summer, with one of her recent interviews - where she talked about the coyotes darting through the sage brush all around her farm.

Posted by: anna | September 29, 2009 at 01:31 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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