The bicycle in literature, exalted in poem and prose.
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There are some big wheels at work here. Mark Twain, William Saroyan, W. Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, P. D. James, Iris Murdoch, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Dylan Thomas are among the many who spun the bicycle into their work, sometimes as a mere prop for conveyance, sometimes as an object of adoration, and sometimes just because its tires were there to kick. This sprightly and comprehensive anthology of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is filled with so many delights and surprises that it manages to create a literary traffic jam.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Old favorite, new cover,
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This review is from: The Literary Cyclist: Great Bicycling Scenes in Literature (Paperback)
This book used to be titled "The Noiseless Tenor", but in this newer edition it has been retitled and given a few extra editorial words. This is a wide-ranging survey of references to the bicycle in mostly-20th-Century works; sometimes the reference is a stretch and Starrs points this fact out. Occasionally he has to piece together fragments of a scene to make the bicycling reference clear. Starrs' piecework is always in italic type -- and occasionally I wondered if he'd ever get to the author's words. But this collection is well-done, and Starrs obviously loves everything to do with the bicycle. His children show up occasionally (mostly in the form of recollections from a cross-country tour while they were growing up), and his own experience influenced the selection. Everything from Ernest Hemingway's flat observational prose to a truly fantastical five-rider cross-country race (against a locomotive) is fair game here, and this book suits its stated purpose of being a volume that can be stashed in the thinking cycle tourist's pannier.
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