Which books are making the critics lose their cool? We’ve rounded up the best bad reviews:
Mary Beard (Guardian) on Rome by Robert Hughes
“The first half of the book, especially the three chapters dealing with the early history of Rome, from Romulus to the end of pagan antiquity, is little short of a disgrace — to both author and publisher. It is riddled with errors and misunderstandings that will mislead the innocent and infuriate the specialist.”
Matthew Syed (The Times) on Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair
“Psychogeography, it would seem, at least in the hands of Sinclair, is not merely obscure, but impenetrable. I read the opening chapter, then the second chapter, hoping that the short, skittish, machine-gun sentence structure, the random jumps in time and context that are Sinclair’s leitmotiv, would become intelligible; in the manner of a hologram which, when looked at for long enough, eventually locks into focus. It didn’t. By the end of Chapter 4 I was hyperventilating out of sheer epistemic confusion; by the end of Chapter 7 I simply wanted to stab myself in the eye.”
Rachel Cooke (Observer) on No Off Switch by Andy Kershaw
“… replete with self-pity and self-regard … He would no more identify himself as a misanthrope or Little Englander than he would stick Steps on his turntable. Yet his opinions could not be more rigid and archaic if he’d found them down the end of Blackpool pier.”
Stephen Amidon (Sunday Times) on The Great Night by Chris Adrian
“While the idea of relocating Shakespeare’s most fey comedy to modern San Francisco is not without its appeal, Adrian never exercises enough control over his material to make the novel work … The result is the sort of shambles that might have been produced by Bottom himself.”
Simon Schama (Financial Times) on The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg
“… what is the point of fictionalising [the Holocaust]? … The only justification would be if the novel yielded some sort of understanding that the archive resists. But no such augmentation of empathy occurs at any point in the course of this relentless, and ultimately tedious, book … [A] lumbering monster of a novel.”
Click here for June’s Hatchet Jobs of the Month.
Anna Baddeley is editor of The Omnivore, which rounds up book, film and theatre reviews from newspapers.
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