First Line Friday!

"Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure."

That’s how this famous first line appears in the original French. It’s a line that has been translated a number of different ways throughout the years:

"For a long time I used to go to bed early."  (C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

"For a long time I would go to bed early."  (D J Enright) 

"For a long time, I went to bed early."  (Lydia Davis)

Then again, it’s from a book whose translated title is still the subject of some debate. It’s an interesting first line, in that it serves as the opening salvo for the novel Swann’s Way, as well as the introduction to Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past, if you prefer that title).  

In either case, it’s a deceptively short and straightforward opening into a work whose later sentences can seem like veritable labyrinths to an overwhelmed reader. You’ll feel like a world-class hurdler as you learn to work your way over dependent clause after dependant clause, keeping your eye on the subject and racing in search of its main predicate ten lines down the page. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess before you get used to it.

Still, I don’t know if I’ve read many books that reached me on quite so deep a level, or many authors who are quite so precise or so thorough in getting their meanings across. And I think the extremely personal nature of the prose starts in that very first line.

Anyone read it? Did you like it? Hate it? Toss it of with ambivalence? I’d be interested to hear.

Review: A Room With A View, by E.M. Forster

There are some among our readership who really have it in for E.M. Forster (what gives?), but we hope you’ll bear with us as we review that author’s A Room With A View.

The book was my first introduction to Forster, and I have to say that I came away generally pleased. It’s not a read that will keep you on the edge of your seat- its major plot points are conversations, betrayals of confidence, and rumors about who will rent the vacant cottage at such and such a place. But if it won’t keep you on the edge of your seat, I think there’s enough to keep you in  your seat- to keep you reading right to the very end.

Now, it is at its core, a romance. This means that the story is wholly dependent on a simple misunderstanding between the two principle characters stretching the entire length of the book. If George an Lucy were able at any moment to actually sit down and have a half-way decent conversation, there would be no story. But true to form, they aren’t; and so there is. Fine.

But here’s where Forster really whimps out: The tension builds and builds (Will Lucy end her engagement to Cecil? Is George’s father really a murderer? Did George not only steal a kiss, but blabber about it to a popular novelist?) We anxiously await the moment when George and Lucy do  finally hash things out, when she realizes that she loves him and always has- but just at the crucial moment- Forster fumbles the ball! He hits the fast forward button and next thing you know, George and Lucy are back in Florence, reminiscing about the winding road that brought them back there. No catharsis, just a few loose ends tied up after the fact. It’s as if he thought that scene would be really difficult to write, so he played it out off-stage. It was a bit of a disappointment.

Still, there is a lot of beautiful writing, some great characters and nice settings. And he presents enough interesting insights into love and happiness and religion to have earned a second read from me. So, for the Forster fans out there: where should I go next? Howard’s End? Or A Passage To India?

From Silver Screen to Printed Page

Often, when the subject of film adaptations comes up, we hear the familiar refrain “Yeah, but the book was better.” But what do we say when the reverse is true- when a book began life as a movie or a screenplay? Here are three such books that are well worth your time.

The Human Comedy, by William Saroyan:

Hired by MGM to write the screenplay for this project, Saroyan was eventually removed after refusing to compromise on the length. While Louis B. Mayer pushed forward on the film version, Saroyan raced to publish his longer version first, as a novel. It’s a short, breezy read… for a book, if not for a screenplay.

Dances With Wolves, by Michael Blake:

Kevin Costner fell in love with this spec-script sometime in the mid-eighties, but Blake had a hard time selling it to anyone. Costner encouraged him to turn it into a novel, with the hopes that it would improve his chances at a sale. Released as a paperback in 1988, Costner finally bought the rights himself. The rest is history. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture in 1990.

No Country For Old Men, by Cormack McCarthy:

Originally penned as a screenplay, McCarthy had little luck in selling this story to Hollywood. As an accomplished novelist, he didn’t need Kevin Costner to tell him to turn it into a novel, which he did in 2005. Enter the Coen brothers, who faithfully adapted the book back into a screenplay in 2007. Four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, were the result.

It’s an interesting subject. I know Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started life as a radio play. (The Infinite Improbablility Drive was Adams’s ingenious way of extending a story he thought was already over.) Certainly in the cases of Dances With Wolves and No Country For Old Men, I think it’s probably safe to say that “the movie was better than the book.” Anyone know of any others?

From the Pen of Jennifer Egan

As a follow-up to yesterday’s review I thought I’d give you a taste of Jennifer Egan’s style. One of the things that struck me about Goon Squad  was her ability to be colorful without being florid. Her descriptions are filled with everyday language that still manages to paint a vivid picture. Here are just a few passages that hit me where it counts (as usual, all emphasis is mine):

They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow.

The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.
 

Sasha gathered up her ubiquitous black bag, a shapeless wishing well from which she'd managed to wrest whatever file or number or slip of paper he'd needed for the past twelve years.

The sun rose, big and shiny and round, like an angel lifting her head. I’d never seen it so brilliant out there. Silver poured over the water.  

The blinds of his loft were up and a tinge of shower humidity hung in the air, pleasantly cut by the smell of brewing coffee.

Bosco brought Stephanie coffee and then began a juddering emersion into his chair, which suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip.

An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck.

 Kitty came toward him slowly- poured toward him, really, that was how smoothly she moved in her sage green dress, as if the jerking awkwardness of walking were something she’d never experienced.

That is some good stuff. It seems there’s a certain magic in backloading your sentences- sticking the most memorable phrases and descriptions on the tail end for maximum impact.

A Visit From the Goon Squad: Believe the hype

Alright. I had my doubts, it’s true.

I had a hard time believing that I would enjoy A Visit from the Goon Squad  half as much as book bloggers, reviewers and members of the Pulitzer Prize Board seemed to think I should. In fact, I was ready to cry foul after the first couple pages, where I encountered parentheses in nearly every paragraph, suspiciously effeminate descriptors like “silvery” and “spiky-haired” and gag-inducing phrases like, “not a bangle jangled.” Blast them all, I thought to myself, I’ve been lured straight into a chick-lit booby trap.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turns out Egan was just playing with characterization- something she does extremely well. The first chapter introduces us to a kleptomaniac record-producer’s assistant, but from there the book branches out and explores the world of her boss and his broken family, her boss’s mentor and his even brokener family, as well as the friendships and falling-outs that shaped the lives of each of the main characters from the beginning.

It’s a collection of interconnected tales that unfold in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with some Italian ghettos and African Bush thrown in for good measure. Each of the stories could easily stand on its own, but together they read like a rangy, meandering novel that explores a number of different viewpoints, characters and timeframes along the way.

Egan does an incredible job of immersing us in the lives of her characters and making their every interaction an exciting new piece of the puzzle. And even when I had my guard up for gimmicks, she seemed to pull them off effortlessly. A chapter written in second person? Recipe for disaster. Yet there we are, drowning in the East River as a doped-up, college-aged, closeted homosexual. Seventy-five straight pages of Powerpoint slides? Again, I was ready for the worst. But Egan crafts a believable narrative out of the dribs and drabs of a teenaged girl’s unorthodox diary.

The last chapter may be the most unconventional of all, but I won’t say any more, for fear of spoiling the read for others. (Still, if anyone knows where I can get a Scotty Haussman Concert T-shirt, I’d certainly like to hear from you.) But do yourself a favor and check out A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Fall asleep with a good book (or a couple thousand)

Well, the days are getting longer and before we know it summer will be upon us. It’s not too early to start planning your next foray into the wilderness.  100BestBooks pointed us to this tent available at Field Candy:

That’s pretty cool. Of course, the slightly more ambitious, slightly less water-proof option is to build your own book igloo. It’s a bit heavier to pack in and a little more labor intensive to set up, but we think you'll agree that it's infinitely cooler, if you can pull it off:

A Big Fish, Wrapped in a Small Book, Inside a Short Video: Part II

As is often the case, one good thing usually leads us to another. Last weekend we shared a short video retelling Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in a series of stop-motion hand drawings.

Now we’ve discovered the amazing animated short below. Created over the course of two years by artist Alexandr Petrov, this paint-on-glass animation netted Petrov the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1999. The original film runs about 20 minutes, but this 8-minute version still captures the major plot points of The Old Man and the Sea. And it’s gorgeous to look at:

.

First Line Friday!

This week's first line comes from a novel that finds itself in my list of the ten greatest novels I've ever read. And from what I can tell, it's somewhat unknown. In the very least, I wouldn't consider it prominent. The line is from Ivan Doig's 1987 novel, Dancing At The Rascal Fair (which is a title that I dislike, but the novel is very good). Here is the first line:

"To say the truth, it was not how I expected - stepping off toward America past a drowned horse."

Has anyone out there ever read Ivan Doig, or more specifically, Dancing at the Rascal Fair? I've encountered very few who have. If you haven't, please do so.

From the Pen of E.M. Forster

I was just getting ready to type up a short review of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, when I stumbled upon these excerpts I had highlighted during my read. I love how Forster gives life to inanimate objects (his face “sprang into tenderness” or “battalions of black pines witnessed the change”) and just as easily turns human characters into inanimate works of art (“She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel…”).

But I think my favorite passage is the third one below. It also happens to be the central plot point of the book. The image of violets running like liquid color is something that has stayed with me since I finished the book last fall. It’s beautiful stuff. All emphasis below is mine- they’re just the lines that knocked me senseless.

She watched the singular creature pace up and down the chapel. For a young man his face was rugged, and--until the shadows fell upon it--hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of acorns. Healthy and muscular, he yet gave her the feeling of greyness, of tragedy that might only find solution in the night. The feeling soon passed; it was unlike her to have entertained anything so subtle. Born of silence and of unknown emotion, it passed when Mr. Emerson returned, and she could re-enter the world of rapid talk, which was alone familiar to her. 

She could not complete it, and looked out absently upon Italy in the wet. The whole life of the South was disorganized and the most graceful nation in Europe had turned into formless lumps of clothes. The street and the river were dirty yellow, the bridge was dirty gray, and the hills were dirty purple.

 Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen onto a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, heading round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion. This terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink like a swimmer who prepares, was the “good man.” But he was not the good man she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw a radiant joy in her face. He saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. 

In the Weald, autumn approached, breaking up the green monotony of summer, touching the parks with the gray-blue of mist, the beech trees with russet, the oak trees with gold. Up on the heights battalions of black pines witnessed the change, themselves unchangeable. Either country was spanned by a cloudless sky and in either arose the tinkle of church bells. 

Lucy’s Sabbath was generally of this amphibious nature. She kept it without hypocrisy in the morning, and broke it without reluctance in the afternoon.

Five Months Down!

Today we throw another month in the ol’ archive and celebrate our best traffic stats to date. Thanks to all of you who drop by sporadically, to the diehards who check in every day, and to those who take the time to comment and to link to us across the interwebs. Whatever your interest in this site, we love that you’re here. Come back soon, and come back often.

We’ve covered some great writers in the past 29 days, as you can see in the word cloud above. As usual, here are the ten strangest search terms that led people here, along with the links to whatever they found:

• Commercial Shipping   >>>>  Yep. We’ve covered that here.
• 1920s outdoor spigot   >>>>  We touched on this briefly, as well.
• Explosion of awesome   >>>>  This could really land you on any of our pages, but most likely this one in particular.
• African goose egg   >>>>  A throw-away line from this post.
• Highschool freshman English   >>>>  First Line Friday… diagrammed! (to the best of my lackluster ability)
• Ear stretcher girl   >>>>  We have no idea where this person ended up. Ear might take you here. Stretcher here. Girl? Who knows.
• Animal House Ending   >>>>  Ah, one of our inaugural posts, forever lost in the obscurity of our earliest days.
• Do Mothers Against Drunk Driving Sell Magazine Subscriptions   >>>>  Great question. I have no idea where we’ve answered it, though.
• John Blutarsky wearing shorts   >>>>   This post, again.
• Table graph of bullfights in Spain   >>>>  It has nothing to do with bull-fights (an oversight we regret), but there are graphs galore here.

And, of course, we’ll leave you with our five most popular posts from this past month:

• The Lit-Fic Starter Kit: Your Quickstart Guide to the Classics
• The Stunning Beauty of Books
• Midnight in Paris: How did Woody Do?
• Literary Death Match: Treasure Island vs. King Solomon’s Mines
• So you wanna be a writer? Paris Edition.

We’d like to make this site as great as our mothers think it is. Let us know how we’re doing in the comments. What do you like? What bores you to death? Things like that…