“Stones and grass have many virtues,” Roberto Bolano has a character say, “but words have more.” I’d reverse that.
In unconnected news: the first two sentences of my review of Marcel Theroux’s Far North originally read, “Far North is a cowboy labour-camp eco-disaster movie, in which a woman passes herself off as a man. Every base is touched.” They luxuriated in a paragraph of their own.
6 Comments
April 14, 2009 at 10:21 am
Let me know when you plan to give your masterclass (or, indeed, mzclass) on writing book reviews, won’t you. That one’s another ace.
April 14, 2009 at 11:20 am
Yes, we are grateful for subs who save luxuriant writers from themselves.
April 14, 2009 at 12:20 pm
What interests me – irks me, actually – is that sub-(presumably)added ‘of a novel’, which I likely wouldn’t have noticed as irksome if you hadn’t given us the ‘book-review-readers-are-actually-intelligent-y’know’ original: “You mean he’s not reviewing a non-existent movie in the books pages? Aw, shucks…”
April 14, 2009 at 2:13 pm
For me the effect was to make the opening statement less blunt; & to reduce the impact of the first sentence of the second paragraph, “It’s the future,” by absorbing it into a longer, slower sequence of words. But mileage will vary, I guess.
April 14, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I see what you mean.
May 4, 2009 at 9:57 pm
[...] of this dispute between nature and books. M John Harrison, one of my favorites, weighed in on this. As he said: “Stones and grass have many virtues,” Roberto Bolano has a character say, “but words have [...]
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