Yesterday was a complex and rewarding day (got up at 5:45, rode my bike downtown for 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, then back uptown to teach Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in the morning and Swift's Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and Johnson's Life of Swift in the afternoon, then musings on Helen Hill's film "The Florestine Collection" and a pizza party at my place afterwards for colleagues, friends and family, my own and Helen's, lay my head down on the pillow around 1am).
Today I am knackered!
Had a very productive afternoon appointment with a pulmonary specialist who has a number of thoughts on how I might tackle the exercise-induced asthma (he also recommends a mighty tome that I have ordered through BorrowDirect; it is prohibitively - comically! - expensive, it is for clinicians!), took a long nap and have spent the rest of the evening devouring Lee Child's The Affair.
I have some treats for upcoming days: the book party for Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods (here's a good interview at Bookforum, and I am delighted to say that Helen is also going to catsit for me next week while I am in Ottawa next week for a visit with Brent's parental units); a production of The Bald Soprano...
Miscellaneous linkage:
Benjamin Weiss defends the Cambridge History of the American Novel against Joseph Epstein's depredations. (These controversies make me throw up my hands in perplexity, I see that they are still 'live' in some sense but they bear no relation to my own personal lived experience of reading and writing and teaching in the academy, so it is hard for me to take them seriously as an account of true living intellectual controversies as opposed to some sort of late-stage playing-out of a long battle between ancients and moderns. I really am going to teach a class on the battle of ancients and moderns one of these days, by the way...)
B. R. Myers at the Atlantic on Peter Temple's crime fiction.
Showing posts with label Peter Temple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Temple. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Truth
Bob Cornwell interviews Peter Temple about his new book Truth, which will appear in the US in May (but you can get The Broken Shore right now...):
BC: You talked about your occasional disagreement with your Australian publisher over your paring down of the prose style. Was the occasional compromise required?(Link courtesy of Sarah.)
PT: If you trust an editor then you must take the person's concerns seriously. There are very few trustable editors, as there are very few good mechanics. I am at the mercy of two excellent practitioners, Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston [at Text Publishing, Temple’s Australian publishers]. They would have made good jockeys: strong in the upper body, in the habit of walking the track before the race to get a feel for the going. When told by one or both of them that the reader would never make sense of something unless I was more explicit, I sometimes gave way.
................................Reluctantly. They turned out to be right most of the time.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Miscellany
What have I been reading? Hmmm...
Galen Beckett, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (very enjoyable, but not as good as Ellen Kushner - and the Austen pastiche works better than the Bronte pastiche).
Michael Crichton, Next (verging on satire rather than suspense, but quite readable - not his best, but then again Crichton could write a halfway decent novel in his sleep).
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. I liked it very much indeed, though I was struggling in the back of my mind as I read to articulate why it is that I do not in the end find Mantel to be in the very top rank of novelists. In a way she's too much of a thinker rather than a writer - it makes her novels attractive to me, but the prose itself does not stand out on the grounds of style, it's more a question of striking ideas.
(I read A Place of Greater Safety in 1993, on the recommendation of Simon Schama, and it certainly prompted me to read all of her other books, though many of them are depressing enough that they can't be called favorites - I do think that I would rate Beyond Black slightly above Wolf Hall, but then Wolf Hall is by far the more enjoyable read due to its subject matter.)
I love historical novels, I grew up reading Robert Graves and Mary Renault and Gore Vidal - and I also read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time at an impressionable age. In other words, when I was ten or eleven Tudor history was on my short list of particular obsessions - I had a poster of that famous portrait of Richard III on the wall of my bedroom, and pored over biographies of Thomas More and so forth. I really, really like what Mantel's done here - the language is fresh (I was skeptical about the choice to write in the present tense, but it works, and she's got an unorthodox but appealing way of using the pronoun "he" as a way of centering the book almost completely inside Thomas Cromwell's head). The characters and the history are immensely appealingly dealt with, and the sheer scope of Mantel's novelistic imagination is perhaps the most impressive thing of all.
My one criticism is that when one turns to sentences and paragraphs, they are much less striking than the overall picture or the intellectual or psychological insights - the book is studded with paragraphs that have a sort of "meta-" or philosophical status, Cromwell is a person of insights, but they are too banal in their phrasing to be worth quoting on stylistic grounds. Which I think is a shortcoming - but it is certainly one of the best novels I've read for quite some time. She has developed a system of notation that is original and highly effective, but it is very much a creation of artifice - as opposed to Peter Temple, say, whose sentences make me feel as though he has actually discovered an almost completely foreign and yet strangely inevitable system for the transcription of reality that truly rocks me off my foundations...
Galen Beckett, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (very enjoyable, but not as good as Ellen Kushner - and the Austen pastiche works better than the Bronte pastiche).
Michael Crichton, Next (verging on satire rather than suspense, but quite readable - not his best, but then again Crichton could write a halfway decent novel in his sleep).
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. I liked it very much indeed, though I was struggling in the back of my mind as I read to articulate why it is that I do not in the end find Mantel to be in the very top rank of novelists. In a way she's too much of a thinker rather than a writer - it makes her novels attractive to me, but the prose itself does not stand out on the grounds of style, it's more a question of striking ideas.
(I read A Place of Greater Safety in 1993, on the recommendation of Simon Schama, and it certainly prompted me to read all of her other books, though many of them are depressing enough that they can't be called favorites - I do think that I would rate Beyond Black slightly above Wolf Hall, but then Wolf Hall is by far the more enjoyable read due to its subject matter.)
I love historical novels, I grew up reading Robert Graves and Mary Renault and Gore Vidal - and I also read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time at an impressionable age. In other words, when I was ten or eleven Tudor history was on my short list of particular obsessions - I had a poster of that famous portrait of Richard III on the wall of my bedroom, and pored over biographies of Thomas More and so forth. I really, really like what Mantel's done here - the language is fresh (I was skeptical about the choice to write in the present tense, but it works, and she's got an unorthodox but appealing way of using the pronoun "he" as a way of centering the book almost completely inside Thomas Cromwell's head). The characters and the history are immensely appealingly dealt with, and the sheer scope of Mantel's novelistic imagination is perhaps the most impressive thing of all.
My one criticism is that when one turns to sentences and paragraphs, they are much less striking than the overall picture or the intellectual or psychological insights - the book is studded with paragraphs that have a sort of "meta-" or philosophical status, Cromwell is a person of insights, but they are too banal in their phrasing to be worth quoting on stylistic grounds. Which I think is a shortcoming - but it is certainly one of the best novels I've read for quite some time. She has developed a system of notation that is original and highly effective, but it is very much a creation of artifice - as opposed to Peter Temple, say, whose sentences make me feel as though he has actually discovered an almost completely foreign and yet strangely inevitable system for the transcription of reality that truly rocks me off my foundations...
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Magical realism
If someone put me on the spot and forced me to name my favorite living writer, I would hem and haw for a while - it is impossible to narrow these things down! - but there would be a good chance, when it came down to it, that I would have to utter the name PETER TEMPLE...
An advance reading copy of his forthcoming novel Truth came my way shortly before I left town in August; it is the sequel to The Broken Shore, and I decided to reread that one first before savoring the new one.
They are the most extraordinary pair of books; often I will single out a sentence or passage that I especially like in a novel, but in this case it is almost impossible to do. Everything is so distinctive and lovely in its formation that it does not make sense to excerpt.
I was thinking as I read about what makes Temple so unusual. He strikingly combines the poet's strengths with the journalist's - it is a very rare combination - Richard Price occasionally gets something a bit like this, but Temple has a much better sense of humor, as well as a deeper interest in character.
His ear for language is exceptional. Sentence by sentence, the casual reader might mistake this stuff for an unreflectively realistic approach to the transcription of human actions, but the cumulative effect is to leave behind a suspicion that Temple has cunningly and covertly invented an entirely new system of notation, one that cleverly masquerades as something like normal writing but is actually mind-blowingly and deceptively original and powerful...
THERE HAD BETTER BE A NEXT VOLUME IN THE SERIES!
An advance reading copy of his forthcoming novel Truth came my way shortly before I left town in August; it is the sequel to The Broken Shore, and I decided to reread that one first before savoring the new one.
They are the most extraordinary pair of books; often I will single out a sentence or passage that I especially like in a novel, but in this case it is almost impossible to do. Everything is so distinctive and lovely in its formation that it does not make sense to excerpt.
I was thinking as I read about what makes Temple so unusual. He strikingly combines the poet's strengths with the journalist's - it is a very rare combination - Richard Price occasionally gets something a bit like this, but Temple has a much better sense of humor, as well as a deeper interest in character.
His ear for language is exceptional. Sentence by sentence, the casual reader might mistake this stuff for an unreflectively realistic approach to the transcription of human actions, but the cumulative effect is to leave behind a suspicion that Temple has cunningly and covertly invented an entirely new system of notation, one that cleverly masquerades as something like normal writing but is actually mind-blowingly and deceptively original and powerful...
THERE HAD BETTER BE A NEXT VOLUME IN THE SERIES!
Friday, July 31, 2009
"Gosh, I could do with a bathe"
At the Guardian, John Mullan lists ten of the best literary swimming scenes!
(Hmmm, I am thinking he has not read Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, or it would be there too...)
In a happy development, I received a copy of the Folio Society edition of The Go-Between as a birthday present - time for a re-read, I think...
(Aciman alert: Eight White Nights: A Novel will be published in February 2010, certainly on my list of most desired things....)
(Oh, I stopped by the office today to take care of several mundane and long-overdue administrative tasks and discovered several things in my mailbox of UTTER DELIGHTFULNESS - namely, new books by Charlie Williams and Peter Temple - if I have self-control, I will save them for the Caymanian interlude that begins next Thursday, but they may prove IRRESISTIBLE!)
(Hmmm, I am thinking he has not read Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, or it would be there too...)
In a happy development, I received a copy of the Folio Society edition of The Go-Between as a birthday present - time for a re-read, I think...
(Aciman alert: Eight White Nights: A Novel will be published in February 2010, certainly on my list of most desired things....)
(Oh, I stopped by the office today to take care of several mundane and long-overdue administrative tasks and discovered several things in my mailbox of UTTER DELIGHTFULNESS - namely, new books by Charlie Williams and Peter Temple - if I have self-control, I will save them for the Caymanian interlude that begins next Thursday, but they may prove IRRESISTIBLE!)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
