A few weeks ago it looked like this column might have to be rechristened Feather Duster Jobs of the Month. The High Court judgment that The Telegraph pay £65,000 in damages over a “spiteful” book review would, we panicked, lead to a climate of fear on Grub Street, with literary editors terrified to publish anything but the most simpering eulogies.
We needn’t have worried.
James Lasdun on House of Holes by Nicholson Baker (Guardian)
“… a completely ridiculous book, whether you read it as camp parody or straight smut. The real story here is why the cleverly observant author of works such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature has chosen to publish something at once so daft and so half-hearted. He calls it an “Entertainment” but “Wank Book” would have been more accurate.”
Jenni Russell on Honey Money by Catherine Hakim (Sunday Times)
“Selling the sex you don’t personally want to have as the route to personal development, confidence and happiness? Driving merciless bargains with men for every erotic encounter? If this is what counts as intellectual discovery at the London School of Economics, or Allen Lane, who publish Hakim, I fear for the future both of universities and of serious books. Don’t bother to buy Honey Money. And if you should pass it in a bookshop, pick up a copy and drop it somewhere where nobody’s likely to take an interest in it. Military history, perhaps, or gardening. You’ll be doing the rest of us a favour.”
Fred Inglis on Visions of England by Roy Strong (Literary Review)
“… in a book in which the whole point and tremulous purpose is the expression on behalf of himself and others of ardent feeling for a familiar landscape, there is only dead prose, lifeless invocation, and great poetry suffocated by its airless context.”
Peter Kemp on The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (Sunday Times)
“… never very effective at giving his characters convincing psychological and emotional life, he fails to make them much more than flat assemblages of quirky traits and eccentricities. Around them, improbable story lines straggle off and peter out irrelevantly … you can’t help feeling The Cat’s Table is rather a dog’s dinner.”
Philip Hensher on When the World Spoke French by Marc Fumaroli (Spectator)
“Its main fault is a tendency towards dreadful verbosity … There were moments when Johnson’s rude remark came to mind: ‘A Frenchman must be always talking, whether he has anything to say or no’ … If Fumaroli’s aim, as I suspect, was to demonstrate by his own refinement and sophistication in prose what has been lost with the decline of French as the international language of choice, I am sorry to tell him that the style disappears quite unlamented.”
Anna Baddeley is editor of The Omnivore, which rounds up press reviews of books, films and plays.
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