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August 11, 2011

FROM FIRST TO LAST

David Kipen, whose lending library Libros Schmibros comes to the westside with a pop-up at the Hammer Museum later this month, writes about the closing night of Village Books in the Palisades, in which your humble host makes a cameo:

To keep my mind off the temptation to weep uncontrollably, I asked myself which book would make the most fitting final purchase. The buzzards had long since started circling, so the remaining books were already huddling toward the middle shelves, hemmed in by vacant plywood on all sides. When I hit Mark Sarvas up for a suggestion, that sly blogger at the Elegant Variation — with unnerving speed, as if he'd already somehow had the question leaked to him — pointed discreetly toward a copy of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. Then he resumed fulminating darkly about the evening's events: "Where were all these people six months ago?"

I'm still fulminating darkly, too angry to put down my own thoughts about the closing.  Everything I have to say will likely get me kicked out of my neighborhood.  So you have Kipen's frankly superior musings in my place.  Check them out.  And for those wondering, my final purchases at Village Books were At Swim-Two-Birds, Pictures from an Institution, The Lonely Passion of Judth Hearne and Kate Christensen's latest, The Astral.

Posted at 09:40 PM in Litlinks |

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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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