Reviewing the Review: October 12 2008
by Levi Asher October 12, 2008 9:04 pm
LA BOHEME, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, POETRY
Every once in a while East Village poet Richard Hell gets invited to write for the New York Times Book Review, and when he does he usually shows the other critics how it's done. His unenthusiastic review of Edmund White's biography Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel is witty, lush and elegant, especially when he ignores White's book and spins his own appreciations:
He learned very much from Baudelaire, and in many ways Baudelaire
remains his master, but Baudelaire was a poet of ennui (and dreams),
while Rimbaud reels with the most robust -- if often contemptuous --
vitality (and dreams).
Edmund White's book is part of James Atlas's series of short
biographies, and Hell clearly seems to think that Atlas ought to have
invited Hell to write the biography of Arthur Rimbaud so that Edmund
White could review it in the NYTBR. Interestingly, Germaine Greer seems
to have a similar feeling about an ambitious history book, The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World
by John Demos. Greer takes John Demos apart like an expert lawyer with
a crouching witness. She seems to have the knowledge to back her
criticism up:
Moreover, Demos is ill equipped to explain why it is that the most
frightful witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries occurred in
Protestant Europe, where the authority of the papacy had been rejected
and minority sects and millennial cults were springing up everywhere.
He disposes of the most diligent witch hunters in Europe in a few brief
synoptic paragraphs that add little to our understanding of why 9
million -- or was it 50,000? -- people were tried as witches between
1550 and 1700.
"Ill equipped"! Ouch. I expect to read a letter of protest from John
Demos two Sundays from now. But it better be a good letter, because
Germaine Greer makes a very strong case.
These two takedowns were the pieces I enjoyed the most in today's Book
Review. I was a bit puzzled at first by Anthony Gottlieb's survey of
parrots in literature but by the time Gottlieb pointed out that
somebody puts a parrot into a stew pot in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and a parrot comes out of a stew pot in Love in the Time of Cholera I was sold. Good parrot piece.
I'm interested in Susan Morgan's Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the "King and I" Governess, based on Leah Price's review, which focuses on a surprising racial angle to the familiar true story.
It's probably not Alan Furst's fault that I don't care about John LeCarre's A Most Wanted Man. I just have better things to read. I'm not sure which of Julia Glass's I See You Everywhere, Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil or Per Paterson's To Siberia
will make it onto my list either, but Liesl Schillinger, Lorraine Adams
and Jonathan Miles all provided useful summaries so I can at least
pretend at cocktail parties if needed.
We are sorry to learn of NYTBR trusted editor Dwight Garner's impending transfer from the Sunday publication to the daily Times book section. At one point we at LitKicks picked Garner to succeed (we hoped) Sam Tanenhaus as the Book Review's chief, based on his prescient creation of the successful blog Paper Cuts. Well, I guess that's not going to happen. I sure hope the Book Review doesn't let Paper Cuts languish in Garner's absence.
On the positive side, this probably means we'll read fewer book reviews
by the consistently disappointing Michiko Kakutani in the daily New
York Times. We can only hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment