Reviewing Reviews

In this age of proliferation for both literary prizes and book reviews, it was only a matter of time before a prize would be awarded to the best book reviews of the year. This prize now exists: created by the website Omnivore.com, which recycles culture reviews from newspaper and magazine websites, The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is meant to celebrate “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. The idea is that, with the decline of newspaper readership in favor of tweets, blogs, and reader reviews on sites like Amazon, the very important job of the true book critic must be honored in some way. The need to praise real, thought-out book reviewing is especially important since newspapers have begun to imitate the web-model themselves in recent years by publishing short, hip book reviews that are more like blurbs or ads than actual content. The truth is, newspapers and magazine should continue offering with pride what anyone with access to the internet can’t do: professional, objective reviews that evaluate books thoroughly, put them into context, and draw comparisons with others works. Because they have the resources, newspapers can provide this kind of in-depth analysis for every review they publish. Then, it’s the reviewers job to keep the standards high and offer something more than a plot summary and a bit of recycled pros and cons. Maybe this prize will help book critics achieve the recognition they deserve

I am becoming increasingly aware of the difference between run of the mill reviews and in-depth, meaty analyses. Often, really good reviews won’t even tell you if the book is bad or good. True reviews are not only there to tell if you should buy the book or not; they’re supposed to draw in material from the outside to help understand how specific books are to be appraised, and then pick at the smallest details to assess their intrinsic qualities. A good example are the amazing pieces over at the New York Review of Books. These are lengthy, in-depth reviews of books that are really essays about the books and the authors who wrote them. Recent excellent examples are the review of Joan Didion’s latest memoir Blue Nights and the phenomenal essay Julian Barnes wrote on Joyce Carol Oates’ own memoir A Widow’s Story.

It’s unfair, however, to say that you can’t get good content on social media. Sometimes, they do provide close contact with really brilliant literary thinkers. I’m thinking of people like Charles May, who, for quite some time now (by internet standards), has been producing consistently  insightful work on his blog, Reading the Short Story. May is an academic who has specialized on the form of the short story; his blog is a collection of his thoughts about books, reviews of contemporary and older short stories, and responses to comments and questions about the form. It’s a very interesting project, and a trustworthy source about authors and books who are worth reading; nowhere else on the internet will you find a lengthy review of a single short story by Alice Munro. 

Among the nominees for the Hatchet Job of the Year (see the shortlist here) are the wonderful classicist Mary Beard, for a Guardian review of Rome, by Robert Hughes, in which she spotted dozens of unacceptable and frustrating mistakes in the chapters about the city’s ancient history (high school level stuff, like confusing CE and BCE, apparently). Mary Beard has declared on her blog that she is not expecting to win the prize. For her, the review she wrote on Hughe’s book was simply part of her job. Reviewers, she writes, should act as “gate-keepers”, lest a book’s success depend entirely on “the size of its publicity budget and the enthusiasm of its publishers’ tweets”. In fact, Mary Beard is a little bit alarmed, because she fears that her review of the book may have been lauded above all others because these other reviewers may have either omitted to mention the erroneous material, or else failed to see it entirely—two “ghastly” prospects. Words of wisdom from a truly admirable woman (as a side note, I saw Mary Beard host the “ancient booker” event at the Cheltenham literary festival last year—she was great). If she wins, she will have gotten herself a year’s supply of potted shrimp. 

REVIEW: Your Face Tomorrow 1, by Javier Marías

Spanish writer and translator Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear (the first volume of a novel in three parts) came to me trailing its own clouds of glory. Lucinda, my beloved bibliotherapist over at Mr. Bs Emporium of Reading Delights, sent it to me calling it a cross between Proust and John Le Carré. The blurbs on the book itself (I have the British edition) are of the kind that are so emphatic in their appreciation that they couldn’t be anything but honest. “Nothing will stop me from devouring all Marías’s previous books” writes on critic, while another declares: “The next thing Marías deserves is the Nobel Prize”. Obviously, my expectations were quite high. Surprisingly, they were satisfied.

This is the novel's UK paperback cover (published by Vintage). It fits with the mood of the book much better than the US cover, especially since motorcycles do not feature in the novel...

Part of the novel’s charm emerges from its pure originality, which is also the reason why it cannot disappoint. Cross between Proust and Le Carré is right; Marías creates his own genre with Your Face Tomorrow — a plotless, murky universe of espionage, Oxford Dons, wartime tales, and undercover agencies. Even that could be déjà-vu, I suppose, if it wasn’t for the added element of Marías’ distinct style. The author is not showing off, he’s having fun. He’s writing from his guts, letting his pen go wherever it wants — or so it seems, because, in the dark work of Your Face Tomorrow, it is essential that you conclude your trajectories, and Marías always concludes his trajectories. This is no easy feat in a novel of digressions, as this one is; the story advances slowly, surely, but the structure of the narrative is built up like Russian dolls, with bits of story fitting into one another. There’s simply nothing quite like it. 

The story itself is about a Spaniard called Jacques Deza, the narrator, who is approached by a strange man called Bertram Tupra during a party hosted by a friend they have in common in Oxford. Tupra, it turns out, is the head of a special agency whose job it is, through the work of skilled, hand-picked agents, to conjecture large amounts of information about people by observing them closely for a very short time — things about them you could only find out if you’d known them for years. Deza is specifically chosen because he has this rare gift himself, a kind of instinctive judgement, the ability to know people incredibly well just by watching them, and begins to work for Tupra, watching videos and observing interviews with all sorts of people in order to find out how they would act when faced with a hard dilemma, if they are to be trusted, and what their values are. The larger purpose of this task remains a mystery, at least in this volume. 

Yet, the book is also about a lot more than that. Two of its characters were inspired by real people the author knew well. The first is Sir Peter Russel, who becomes Peter Wheeler in the story, a professor of Hispanic History at Oxford, a perfectionist and a hedonist of sorts, with a past as a spy for the MI5 and MI6 in the 1930s and 40s. (You can read the fascinating obituary of Professor Sir Peter Russell here to get a sense of the richness of the character). Through him and the party he hosts in Oxford, Marías cleverly explores the aura of this mythic university and the quirky characters who inhabit it (as he did in his 1992 novel All Souls), as well as the secret history of so many Oxford pre-war graduates who were hired as spies by the British government. The author’s own father also finds his way into the novel as the narrator’s father, a journalist during the Spanish Civil War who was imprisoned after Franco’s victory on the basis of lies told by a treacherous friend. 

Fever and Spear is a masterpiece: an intellectual thriller, an introspective page turner, a narrative experiment which burns its own unassuming, singular path through contemporary literature. Only a full school year and an undergraduate thesis will stop me from reading the other two volumes of Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow.

Javier Marías. Photo taken from Conversational Reading.

Eco the Memorious*

The UK edition of Umberto Eco's novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. The title is a reference to one of the comic books the novel's protagonist read as a child.

The Borgesian twist at the center of Umberto Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is one of the most exciting premises I’ve recently encountered: after an accident, a man loses the memory of his entire life — his wife, his children, his job, his own name — but remembers with exactness all of the books he has ever read. The stunning opening pages of the novel are essentially a collection of various quotes from world literature, strung together into coherent paragraphs, just like the protagonist can only answer in quotations from author’s he has read when people speak to him when he first wakes up from his coma. In the middle of section of the novel, which makes its greatest chunk, the protagonist returns to the Italian country house where he spent much of his childhood, in order to sift through the souvenirs amassed there — old vinyls, comic books, schoolbooks, antiques — and try to hunt down his memories. The protagonist eventually finds evidence of a first love, which would’ve left a deep mark on him, and begins to follow its trail, down into the darkest pits of his being.

The novel is intensely readable and great fun. Like in The Name of the Rose, Eco uses the structure of the mystery in order to propel the plot forward with great skill. The protagonist — sympathetic, extremely well-read, a bit of a womanizer, and with gentlemanly tastes — is an able substitute for Eco, and a joy to spend time with. Through him and his reemerging into the material that made up his life — books, of course, but also things like newspapers, songs, and radio shows — the reader discovers and understands a lot about the rise of fascism in Italy, Catholicism, and how people lived through the war in rural Italy. When the protagonist finally recovers some of the memories, and is able to make sense of certain obsessions (for instance, he has collected quotes about fog all of his life). These final chapters are very moving, and portray Eco’s talent as a storyteller.

The cover for the American edition of the novel is a collage of some of the images featured in the book.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a tremendous achievement because it encompasses so much material: numerous (almost numberless) quotations and references with which the text is riddled (there is an online wiki project to find them all) as well the images that accompany the them. Eco’s skill, as always, lies in the casualness with which he assails the reader with his incomparable erudition. The beginning of the novel is especially frustrating for the reader who recognizes, perhaps, one reference in ten, or twenty, aware that he is missing many many more. In the middle section, the material is essentially Italian, and although it’s all very interesting, here I found myself wishing I were Italian so I could recognize at least some of things he refers to. Yet, in all this, it is clear that Eco is not showing off — he’s only having fun. Eco gave a wonderful and very instructive interview in The Paris Review a few years ago, in which he explains that as he grows older, he remembers more, and things that he thought he had forgotten start to resurface. For Eco, reading is the key to developing a sprawling memory, and be able to live many lives. The perfection and detail with which he has constructed the life of one man in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a gift to the reader, another life to assimilate. 

*The title of this post is a transformation of the title of Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Funes el Memorioso” — traditionally translated as the ungrammatical “Funes the Memorious”, because there is no adjective for “memory” in English — about a boy who, although incapable of having abstract ideas, remembers every detail of everything with frightful perfection.