The French are coming! The French are coming!

Amid fascinating new theories I've been reading about the origins of English (Stephen Oppenheimer's Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain could easily include chapters called "No Saxons, Please; We're English," "All Angles," or "Some of My Best Friends are Jutes"), comes crime fiction news about the French:

Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, translated by Sian Reynolds, and Pierre Lemaitre's Alex, translated by Frank Wynne, were named joint winners this week of the International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction by the Crime Writers' Association in the UK. The news release announcing the award says the CWA plans to establish a French chapter "in the near future."

Wynne, Lemaitre, and fellow French authors Antonin Varenne and Xavier-Marie Bonnot attended Bristol's Crimefest 2013 along with your humble blogkeeper, so perhaps French crime writing is about to start enjoying a higher profile in the UK and then, perhaps, in America (Alex is to be released in the U.S. in September.)

Whatever its profile in the UK at large, French crime writing has enjoyed an outsize profile at the Daggers. This year marked the fifth time in the International Dagger's eight-year history that the award had gone to a French novel or novels. The award was the fourth for Vargas/Reynolds, following on The Three Evangelists in 2006, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007, and The Chalk Circle Man in 2009. Dominique Manotti's  Lorraine Connection, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz, was the other French winner, in 2008.

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Your humble blogkeeper interviewed Fred Vargas last month and Sian Reynolds in 2008. It was Reynolds' solution to a bit of untranslatable wordplay in The Three Evangelists that spurred me to start interviewing authors and translators in the first place. I also reviewed The Ghost Riders of Ordebec in the Philadelphia Inquirer in June.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

(Im)personal

One thing I like about Barry Cunliffe's popular-science writing is that he does not open his prefaces, introductions, or first chapters with a personal anecdote. He does not, in other words condescend to the reader (and, not incidentally, amplify his own importance) with some forced or touching incident of doubtful relevance to the matter at hand.

That's not to say Cunliffe effaces his personality. Rather, he expresses it through his enthusiasm for his subject. Britain Begins and now Europe Between the Oceans leave me with an impression of Cunliffe's lively intelligence as well as awe and fascination with the range and depth of European geography, archaeology, and history.

Cunliffe's books led me to a book by another author on a related subject that opens with a long anecdote whose point is debatable. The anecdote would make a charming inclusion in a memoir of My Summers in Wales, but its relevance to the subject — population genetics — is questionable.

That's the preface. In the main body of the book, the text abounds with clearlys and significantlys and to summarizes, sure signs that the author lacks confidence in his ability to tell a story so feels he must keep repeating it.

I learned early in my career as a copy editor that even the most cack-handed word-butcher can produce elegant, affecting prose when writing personal memoir. Good writers can make the leap, bringing the freshness and natural flow of memoir to their exploration of other subjects. Cunliffe can; his inferior follower cannot, so I wish he'd stuck to the first until he could master the second. (Of course, with the advent of the god-awful coinage journaling, personal writing may have turned to crap, too.)

A few tips for would-be science writers who feel they must relate to the reader: Don't talk about your long-ago summers. Stay away from crusty but beloved aunts or grandfathers. And never, ever mention idylls, Welsh or otherwise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Goddamnit! plus thoughts on Barry Cunliffe

Barry Cunliffe is a wide-ranging scholar, an eminent archaeologist, a stimulating thinker, and a fluent and engaging writer. But he (or his editors) doesn't know what mitigate means. Here's a sentence from Britain Begins, his history of the peopling of Britain and Ireland, boldface mine:

"A genetically conditioned predisposition to be mobile is, however, balanced by a sense of territoriality which mitigates against wandering."

I knew a professor at the Univerity of Pennsylvania who similarly misused mitigate for militate. Mitigate means to ease, mollify, or alleviate: A nip of schnapps mitigated the surgery's painful aftereffects. Militate means to have an effect, to weigh (against), or, loosely, to conspire or work (against): His insistence on correct word usage militates against the possibility that he will ever be promoted. Militate takes a preposition (against). Mitigate does not.

I don't know what Cunliffe's copy editor was doing the day that sentence came across his or her desk. Dreaming of citizen journalism, self-publishing, and the benefits of overthrowing gatekeepers, maybe.

Cunliffe, meanwhile, is even more impressive than I thought. I'd known of his work on the big-picture issue of population origins, but he's also a nuts-and-bolts archaeologist. I have just learned that he was involved in excavating Fishbourne Roman Palace in England, one of the most moving, because most human, of all Roman remains. This knowledge mitigates, if only slightly, my annoyance at his book's misuse of a word.

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What misuses of words have driven you nuts in your reading?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013