{"id":2082,"date":"2016-03-20T11:59:20","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T11:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=2082"},"modified":"2016-03-20T11:59:20","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T11:59:20","slug":"when-book-reviews-go-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/when-book-reviews-go-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"When Book Reviews Go Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago I was reading Publishers Weekly and a reviewer compared a new memoir to The Great Gatsby <\/em>for its beautiful prose.<\/p>\n

Gatsby<\/em> is one of my favorite novels and I’ve read it many times, so I was puzzled when I read the lines the reviewer quoted as “proof.”\u00a0 I don’t remember the book now, but I do remember I kept re-reading the excerpt, trying to figure out what I was missing.<\/p>\n

By bringing up Fitzgerald, the reviewer set a very high standard, and I suspect I wasn’t the only reader who read the passage he picked and thought, “Seriously?”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I had a somewhat similar experience recently reading a review in The New Yorker<\/em> of a novel called Black Deutschland<\/em>.\u00a0 The title grabbed me, and the setting, because it takes place partly in Berlin, a city I’ve visited a few times and want to revisit soon.\u00a0 But as I read more of the glowing review, I felt less and less interested, which couldn’t have been the reviewer’s intent.<\/p>\n

James Woods wrote that “The Berlin part of [the main character’s] story can seem shapeless, even incoherent in places, though it is never without charm. Sometimes one has the sense….of a stream of consciousness without a stream. Or perhaps it is a consciousness that is missing: [he] can seem an amorphous witness, never quite present in his own sentences.”<\/p>\n

Really–this is a novel worth spending time with?<\/p>\n

\"puzzled-look\"<\/a>But the review was short, and there was the siren call of Berlin, however shapeless and incoherent that was.\u00a0 So I kept reading, and Woods brought out the heavy guns: quotations from the book. They did the exact opposite of sealing the deal for me.<\/p>\n

Despite the gravity of [his] burdens and dilemmas (race, success, sanity, America, Germany), the book\u2019s tone is comic, pleasingly spry, and the prose breaks naturally into witty one-liners: \u201cManfred had a type: the most attractive woman in the room.\u201d Or this piece of perfected wisdom: \u201cOne of the surprises of growing up was finding out what things had been about.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

What’s especially witty in those lines?<\/p>\n

The review not only left me uninterested in Black Deutschland<\/em>, it made me doubt Woods’ taste as a reviewer and think about moving him into the Michiko Kakutani category.\u00a0 If she praises a book in the New York Times<\/em>, I usually don’t like it.\u00a0 And once when she trashed a book, I was so intrigued I went right out to my neighborhood bookstore, bought it, loved it, and wrote the author fan mail.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael’s 25th book Assault With a Deadly Lie <\/a>was a finalist for a Midwest Book Award.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Years ago I was reading Publishers Weekly and a reviewer compared a new memoir to The Great Gatsby for its beautiful prose. Gatsby is one of my favorite novels and I’ve read it many times, so I was puzzled when I read the lines the reviewer quoted as “proof.”\u00a0 I don’t remember the book now, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[293,703,113,518,323,702,513,705,704,514,621],"class_list":["post-2082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-berlin","tag-black-deutschland","tag-book-reviewers","tag-book-reviews","tag-fan-mail","tag-james-woods","tag-michiko-kakutani","tag-pw","tag-the-great-gatsby","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2082"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2124,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions\/2124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}