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October 21, 2010

Comments

K

No matter what, you'll never make me like Madame Bovary.

Gary

I only wish there was some way of letting the NY Times Book editors know directly how lousy this review was. Nobody needed Harrison to review the novel but only the translation, which she seemed totally incapable of doing. I blame the editors for assigning her the piece in the first place and then not killing it before it saw the light of day.

Niall

The only pathos I recall from Madame Bovary is the description of the wedding party disappearing through the fields, leaving the parents to contemplate their uselessness and emptiness. No irony there. None needed.

What I recall about Madame B isn't its pathos, but its steely forensic drive. The irony really only comes into play with the pseudo-Voltaire of a pharmacist, who, of course, turns out to be the biggest hypocrite of all.

And why is anyone still reading NY Times book reviews? Are you still watching newsreels too?

James

'Irony doesn't detract from pathos' means 'just because Flaubert sneers at shallow Emma doesn't mean he lacks sympathy for her.' That kind of sympathy is known as pity.

Franklin thinks pitiableness lets Emma star in a great, realism-defining novel, and that this justifies Flaubert's sneering--unless we want to reconsider the validity of realism and prevailing/historical critical opinion.

But isn't pity judgemental and condescending? A conjectural account of my beloved dog's point of view will have pathos. But should we call my fantasy 'realism' and view it as the noblest goal of characterization and/or literature?

If realism means 'ideally, lit should be conjectures about the mindset of pitiable fools,' who needs realism?

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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."