Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Of noses and paper clips ...

... or, Why Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil is the Worst Book of the Decade. Ouch!

What can I say? I loved this, Blue Meanie that I am.

11 comments:

  1. I doubt I'll be reading this book. My opinion of Martel's previous work remains the same:

    Further proof, apparently, that publishers don't pay their editors to actually edit any more. Perhaps this might have been salvaged as a passable novella, if edited and trimmed.

    But who dares to edit writers who have previous best-sellers? Almost no one. And thus does the public suffer a decline in overall quality, and get used to it, like the frog slowly being boiled alive as the temperature gradually rises.

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  2. I stopped reading seriously after 'the fourth-class method of self-publication'. What is blogging except a method of self-publishing?

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  3. Negative reviews--especially snarky, vitriolic reviews--serve little purpose other than to bolster the ego of the reviewer. The review becomes one of those "Hey, look at me! Ain't I a smart reviewer?" moments. Of course, I could be wrong.

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  4. I think, R.T., you could say that of this review - and once can say it many reviews, I know - if Ed had not provided so much evidence from the text of the book itself. And reading a bad book can be exasperating. I had to read The Da Vinci Code in order to write an article about it and it is altogether possible that what I wrote was nastier than it needed to be because I has pissed at having had to read the damn thing in the first place. I felt the same way about The Road -- and the piece I wrote is indeed means (but not, I like to think, mean-spirited).But sometimes you just feel the need to vent.

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  5. Hi Lee,
    I didn't read Ed as saying that self-publishing itself as fourth-rate, but rather that there are fourth-rate ways of self-publishing.

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  6. I tend to agree with R.T. here. What good purpose does rancour serve? Ron Charles' review is just as critical, but his evidence is better contextualised, i.e. he grapples with Martel's intent. (I suppose Ed would argue that Martel has no intent.)

    Here's a link to the Washington Post review:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/13/AR2010041303903_2.html?sid=ST2010041401673

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  7. I agree with Frank: Ed provided a lot of data from the text of the book itself. While many reviewers do indeed use snark to bolster their own egos, in Ed's case I haven't seem him doing that before, and I don't think he's doing it here. It's still all about the book, and not about Ed.

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  8. Thanks for everyone's thoughts in relation to my review. Just to be clear, my motivation in writing this review was to warn readers away from a book that is, most assuredly, the worst book of the decade -- an opinion that is nearly shared by the Washington Post's Ron Charles and the New York Times's Michiko Kakutani.

    My review was not an act of ego, although by R.T.'s definition, every writer is an egotist whenever they publish so much as a sentence. It was a strenuous warning to stay away from a book that was godawful, that was being relentlessly shoved down our throats by marketing forces. And it was a way for me to exorcise the remaining dregs of anger that reading the entirety of the book caused me. (That may very well be perceived as egotism. But I really don't want anybody to have to endure what I stubbornly subjected myself to. So hopefully this sentiment absolves me.) Now I am calm and cleansed.

    What good purpose does rancor serve? Legitimate protest and public awareness of a truly baleful item. But it must be informed, as this review was by citing numerous examples.

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