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The Beautiful Machine
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John Carr
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Jan 11, 2009 11:53 PST
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Bothers and sisters of the spoke:
My knowing spouse annually gives me at Christmas one or two cycling books. Her sapience - she insists it is no more than good luck at guessing and an occasional inspiration - led this year to Graeme Fife's recent (2007) The Beautiful Machine. It is a summary of high and low points of Fife's life as an amateur cyclist, and is also, bar none, the best read I've had in some time and the best (in the way I explain below) cycling book I have ever encountered.
Fife, a former secondary school teacher of Classics with the love of words themselves which distinguishes all great stylists, displays a writing style which engages the senses in the "feel" of cycling as well as any writer on the subject known to me. His accounts - as an amateur always - of climbing l'Alpe d'Huez and the Col de Glandon, the Tourmalet, and the short but nasty cols in Kent where he lives, will pull you into those experiences as if you were alongside him, and his tale of an odyssey across the sands of Mali to Timbuktu is as vivid as a motion picture. His "tall tales" of pursuing (and being pursued by) the peloton of an "alien" cycling club and of leading an old-farts tour called the Pyreneean Raid are comic and sardonic equally.
If the book has a weakness, it is in the episodes of rides with Fife's cycling pals, great and unknown, but the frequent mots justes and perceptions of people and things more than compensate for one's occasional befuddlement with inside jokes and references and annoyance with Fife's fondness for certain exotic words (louche, for example - look it up).
Ride (preferably - but go) swiftly and get your own copy. You will not be disappointed.
John Carr
elib-@comcast.net
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it - if you live. (Mark Twain)
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