I can’t remember the last time I got swept up by a novel’s exuberance….actually, I can. Eley Williams reminds me of Ali Smith in her sheer adoration of words and willingness to follow a sentence wherever it wants to go.
I first heard her/about her on Backlisted, by far my favorite podcast for where can you hear wildly smart and funny Brits talk about old books and their authors as if they were shiny new. Williams was on a episode about The Victorian Chaise-longue, a short novel by Marghanita Laski. They mentioned The Liar’s Dictionary and I immediately ordered it on Alibris. The day it arrived, it was reviewed in the New York Times, which is always a bit of a downer when you think you’ve discovered something.
It is a book to read for the language, not the plot, but isn’t that why you read a book? A sample:
“The idiom Weasel words apparently comes from the folklore that weasels are able to slurp the contents of an egg while leaving the shell intact. Teaching your weasel how to suck eggs. Weasel words are phrases designed to sound authoritative or meaningful when they lack content or meaning.”
Kate Staples 