When Elegance Meets Eloquence


The Tartar Steppe (Il deserto dei tartari) by Dino Buzzati is one of those books with which I have a long standing love affair. I may neglect it for months, but then I have the irresistible urge to be seduced by it again.

Nobody writes like Buzzati. His use of figurative language and symbolism is never decorative; it is always strictly at the service of clarity.

In the following excerpt, which I translated from the original (it doesn't do it justice but I couldn't find another), Buzzati describes how his protagonist, Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, home on leave from his military posting, realises his youth has come to an end.

Buzzati's skill is to have Drogo come to this abrupt and painful realisation not through something that happens, but something that doesn't take place. The absence of a maternal gesture he'd taken for granted; his mother waking up in the middle of the night to check that he'd finally come home safe.

Buzzati's mastery lies in having Drogo describe this critical moment as a reflection. By doing this, we witness the transformation with the main character, sharing his pain.

In the Tartar Steppe, Buzzati's words paint pictures that speak to our eyes, our ears, and ultimately to our hearts. It is a model of elegance and a triumph of eloquence; one that seduces and teaches in equal measure.


"There was a time when his footsteps would have reached her in her sleep as a set signal. All other noises of the night, even if loud, would not have woken her up, neither the horse carriage in the street, nor the wailing of a child, nor the howling of dogs, nor the owls, nor the shutters flapping. And not because he was noisy (Giovanni walked on tiptoes). There was no special reason for this, it was just because he was the son. But now alas, this was no longer the case. Now he had said "Hi!" to his mum like in the old days, with the same tone of voice, sure that, at the familiar sound of his footsteps, she would have woken. But no one had replied but the rumbling of a distant horse carriage. Nothing to worry about, he thought, it may just be a ridiculous coincidence. And yet, as he prepared to go to bed, he felt a bitter sensation, as if the affections she once had for him had waned, as if the time and distance between them had slowly drawn a veil of separation between them."

(original in Italian)
"Una volta i suoi passi la raggiungevano nel sonno come un richiamo stabilito. Tuttigli altri rumori nella notte, anche se molto più forti, non bastavano a svegliarla, né icarri giù nella strada, né il pianto di un bambino, né gli ululati dei cani, né le civette,né l'imposta che sbatte, né il vento dentro le gronde, né la pioggia o lo scricchiolaredei mobili. Soltanto il passo di lui la svegliava, non perché fosse rumoroso (Giovannianzi andava in punta di piedi). Nessuna speciale ragione, soltanto che lui era ilfigliolo. Ma adesso dunque non più. Adesso lui aveva salutato la mamma come unavolta, con la medesima inflessione di voce, certo che al familiare rumore dei suoipassi si fosse destata. Invece nessuno gli aveva risposto fuori che il rotolio dellalontana carrozza. Una stupidaggine, pensò, una ridicola coincidenza, poteva anchedarsi. Eppure gliene restava, mentre si disponeva a entrare nel letto, una impressioneamara, quasi l'affetto di una volta si fosse appannato, come se fra loro due il tempo ela lontananza avessero lentamente disteso un velo di separazione."


Alberico Collina

Modify to Save Words not to Embellish

The opening lines of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway are deceptively simple. Hemingway is famous for using few adjectives and adverbs, so when he does employ them, it's usually for good reasons.

The boy's parents tell the boy that the old man is "definitely and finally" unlucky. In other words, they are implying that there is no doubt that he is unlucky and that his bad luck is irreversible. I needed fifteen words to explain that. Hemingway needs three. Two adverbs and a conjunction.

The old man's skiff is "empty" because there are no fish. The sail is "patched with flour sacks" because there is no money for a new one. The sail is "furled" because the day is over. And it looks like the flag of "permanent defeat" because no wind blows in it. In all four cases, the adjective modifies the noun by bringing our attention to what is missing. The adjectives give us an immediate visual cue or emotional dimension, which would otherwise need a lengthy description.

Budding writers are often told to eliminate  adjectives and adverbs to achieve a tight and vivid prose. However, skilled writers are able to employ them exactly for that purpose. And there are few writers who do this better than Hemingway. He's in a league of his own.

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat."




Alberico Collina

The Writer's Trinity

In this brief excerpt, Graham Greene describes the writing method that allowed him to produce a novel a year. It reveals a very disciplined individual who has learned to pace himself. One who writes five hundred words a day and stops mid-sentence, only to pick up the next day from precisely where he left off the day before.

In the evening, he reads the work written in the morning. He knows his mind will work in the background during sleep. He calls on his unconscious to counsel him because "...in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper." He does not appear to be afflicted by writer's block in any way since, as he says, "We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."

It's the Writer's Trinity: talent, method, and discipline.

"Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I have always been very methodical, and when my quota of work is done I break off, even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning’s work I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript. No printer need make a careful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page is marked the figure — 83,764. When I was young not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be in getting to bed — as long as I slept in my own bed — I would read the morning’s work over and sleep on it. … So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious; in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."



Alberico Collina

It's not the Story, it's the Storyteller


Told After Supper by Jerome K. Jerome is one of those books I dip into every now and again. Jerome's writing is deceptively effortless and his comic timing is immaculate.

Jerome's skill derives from his ability to put us in the protagonist's shoes and enable us to quickly visualise what he sees. His words make us feel we are the hapless raconteur, and we share his embarrassment. By varying the length of his sentences, and by clever syntax, we are given suspense, and an idea of the main character's ramblings.

Jerome is a cheeky virtuoso, a master storyteller who plays with us, the reader, while telling us he's doing so.
Look at this brief excerpt, in which he describes his alcohol-fueled efforts at telling a ghost story to fellow guests on Christmas eve. It's simply superb. And superbly simple.

"I started relating a most interesting anecdote, but was somewhat
surprised to observe, as I went on, that nobody was paying the
slightest attention to me whatever. I thought this rather rude of
them at first, until it dawned upon me that I was talking to myself
all the time, instead of out aloud, so that, of course, they did
not know that I was telling them a tale at all, and were probably
puzzled to understand the meaning of my animated expression and
eloquent gestures. It was a most curious mistake for any one to
make. I never knew such a thing happen to me before."


Alberico Collina

A Fireman's Conscience


The opening lines to FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury are manic and magical. Montag, the protagonist is a fireman with a difference. He doesn't put out fires, he burns books; 451 Fahrenheit being the temperature at which book paper burns. And he not only burns books, he gets a kick out of it.

Bradbury employs similes and metaphors to give us insight into Montag's disturbed mind. Montag's delusions of grandeur make him appear as "...some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies...". The hose he wields becomes a "...great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world...". The burning debris flying around him becomes "...a swarm of fireflies..." through which he strides.

But Montag's beginning to question what he does and why he does it. He's someone who, in the fury of a hungry fire, notices how "...flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house.". Someone who's developing a conscience. Someone who needs to be careful.

"It was a pleasure to burn it. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame. He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that. smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered."



Alberico Collina

Selling the Future


The opening scene of Up In The Air written by Sheldon Turner and Jason Reitman is compelling. Ryan Bingham, a flight-hopping corporate down-sizer, is giving a speech in the conference room of some anonymous hotel. His must be one of the toughest jobs on earth. He's hired to let go of many people in few days.

Ray Bingham knows people don't like change. And he knows there's only one way to deliver it to them. He must sell them the future. A future unburdened by the past and packed with possibilities. His message is simple: what you own ends up weighing you down. And since "moving is living", getting rid of your possessions, of your job, of your past is not something to fear. It's a chance to start over.

Shameless and effective.


"How much does your life weigh? (Ryan pauses to let us consider this.)

Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack... I want you to feel the straps on your shoulders... You feel them? (gives us a beat) Now, I want you to pack it with all the stuff you have in your life. Start with the little things. The stuff in drawers and on shelves. The collectables and knick-knacks. Feel the weight as it adds up. Now, start adding the larger stuff. Your clothes, table top appliances, lamps, linens, your TV. That backpack should be getting pretty heavy at this point - Go Bigger. Your couch, your bed, your kitchen table. Stuff it all in... Your car, get it in there... Your home, whether you have a studio apartment or a two story house, I want you to stuff it into that backpack. (Ryan takes a beat to let the weight sink in.)

Now try to walk. (We hear people around us chuckling. Ryan smiles).

Kinda hard, isn't it? This is what we do to ourselves on a daily basis. We weigh ourselves down until we can't even move. And make no mistake - Moving is living. (We see nodding. People's gears turning.)

Now, I'm going to set your backpack on fire. What do you want to take out of it? Photos? Photos are for people who can't remember. Drink some gingko and let the photos burn. In fact let everything burn and imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. (a beat of emphasis) It's kind of exhilarating isn't it? That is how I approach every day."



Alberico Collina

Tragicomic Train

The opening line of Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis is both original and inventive.
It's original because it begins with "And", as if we'd been in conversation with the narrator before the novel starts. And we're just picking up where we left off.

It's inventive because it's just one sentence. But it's 140 words long. It must've one of the lowest readability of all opening lines ever written. Yet it works.

It works because the narrator comically mimics the speech pattern of the girl, who has confided in him. A twenty-something girl, who, when eighteen, lost her virginity to someone "who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie." You've got to love the vagueness of that tragic phrase. And you've got to love that the only comment the narrator makes is that she lost her virginity "late", as if she were somehow leading a conservative lifestyle, which makes you wonder about how wild his life must be.

We don't know where this tragicomic train is headed. It could even be an accident waiting to happen. But we don't care. We just have to jump on. And hold on. If we did anything else, we'd only regret it.

“And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.”


Alberico Collina

Starscrapers

The film The Right Stuff based on the book by the same name written by Tom Wolfe has one of the greatest narrated openings ever. It's a movie about the first men in space. And it begins with a myth. A myth that was waiting to be broken. By one man. Chuck Yeager. The first of a long line of pilots, whose heroic exploits fired the imagination of generations. Pilots and astronauts who reached the stars and made us dream. Men who became legends in their lifetime.

"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier."


Alberico Collina

Eloquent Thoughts

The Piano, written and directed by Jane Campion, begins with a voice-over with a difference. The voice we hear is not that of Ada, the protagonist. She doesn't have a voice. She is mute. What we hear are her thoughts. And they are eloquent.

From this short introduction, we learn much about Ada and her predicament. We learn that she wasn't born mute. She became so, as a consequence of some childhood trauma, the cause of which she has removed from consciousness. We learn that her father identifies her condition with "a dark talent", an extraordinary force of will, that verges on the suicidal. We learn that she is married to a religious man. A man who resides abroad and that she and her daughter are about to join. We learn that she hopes her husband will have the divine patience needed to withstand her unnerving silence. But, most importantly, we learn that Ada only "speaks" through her piano, and that, without it, she feels cut off from the world. A world below which run strong feelings and passions, those of a mother, of a bride, but, above all, of a woman.

ADA (voice-over) "The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind's voice. I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why, not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last. Today he married me to a man I've not yet met. Soon my daughter and I shall join him in his own country. My husband said my muteness does not bother him. He writes and hark this: God loves dumb creatures, so why not he! Were good he had God's patience for silence affects everyone in the end. The strange thing is I don't think myself silent, that is, because of my piano. I shall miss it on the journey."



Aberico Collina

Wors That Expand Our World

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens describes the hunger that haunted and plagued the poor, by employing visually compelling metaphors. Hunger's a plant and its seeds are "ploughed" into the wrinkles of the young and the old, who age precociously working at the mill. It's "pushed out of tall houses" like an uninvited guest. It's "patched" into threadbare clothing. Hunger is everywhere. It's in the shortage of food on display in the shops. It's in the lack of chimney smoke and in the absence of offal refuse. Hunger's "dry bones" rattle inside "the roasting chestnut cylinder".

Dickens breathes life into things. He uses words to make them come alive. He gives physical attributes to feelings, and he gives feelings to physical entities - hunger has a skeleton while oil drops are "reluctant".
If language defines the limits to our world, reading Dickens is the equivalent of living inside a universe that expands with every line.

"...The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil."



Alberico Collina