We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews:
Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times)
‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’
Virginia Blackburn on Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Sunday Express)
‘The main problem with this ridiculous book is that Jeanette clearly thinks that her opinions and feelings about everything are totally fascinating whereas to the rest of us she comes across as self-obsessed, self-indulgent and with an ego the size of a planet. Whatever Mrs W did to her in childhood certainly didn’t harm her self-belief.’
Jenny Diski on Deceit and Self-Deception by Robert Trivers (Guardian)
‘I wasn’t surprised to discover that he is on prescription antidepressants, as well as using ganja and cocaine … There will be Iron Johns who read this book and cheer, and although he explains that each sex contains both male and female genes, my male genes are just too wimpy to find any charm in Trivers’s display of self-disclosure – machismo and pet peeves – dressed up as an important new evolutionary understanding of humanity.’
Christopher R. Beha on The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (London Review of Books)
‘To borrow some terms from Semiotics 211, Eugenides has written a book that is at once ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’, a book that never stops being a coming of age novel, that is forever winking through the mask but never lets it drop … The Marriage Plot doesn’t fail because it is ‘merely’ a realist novel, it fails because it is so often a pedestrian one.’
Robert Collins on 1Q84 by Harukmi Murakami (Sunday Times)
‘Will Aomame escape 1Q84 to find Tengo in 1984? It’s increasingly hard to care. Famous for writing with no pre-planned plot, Murakami is stymied here by just the opposite: clearly knowing that his story has only one (rather inevitable) place to go, he resorts to excruciating Dan Brown-style cliffhangers to ramp up the pace: “I have to find Tengo,” thinks Aomame. Paragraph break. “No matter what it takes.” Just as frustratingly, neither the world of 1Q84 nor of the Little People is much developed beyond its sketchy, initial concept. As a result, the book suffers from the double agony of being staggeringly overlong and staggeringly underdeveloped.’
*
American Hatchet Job of the Month
For HJotM to venture outside these shores is unheard of, but we couldn’t resist this offering from US magazine The New Republic. Even if you’re not particularly interested in academic debates about online privacy, this blistering attack by Evgeny Morozov on Public Parts, the latest manifesto from digital guru Jeff Jarvis, is guaranteed to delight:
‘Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody — as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison — it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.’
Read the full review for maximum impact.
Anna Baddeley is editor of the Omnivore.
Comments