Lobstergirl's Full Review: Nick Hornby - Shakespeare Wrote for Money
The only thing you can conclude from this book and others like it (this is the third and last compilation of Hornby's bookreviewing columns from the Believer) is that writers are a lot less critical of other writers than us regular people are. Hornby finds most of the books he reads wondrous, brilliant, smashing, absorbing, astounding, beautiful, haunting, visceral, inspirational, or "superbly realized."
I suppose this is because writers know just how difficult churning out novels is, whereas readers are merely consumers who haven't gone through the process. If we'd birthed some novels ourselves, we'd probably be a lot more sympathetic and forgiving. I hated Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country; Hornby decided it was "wonderful," a "sophisticated piece of adult entertainment that took "narrative risks." I found Ian McEwen's Saturday painfully, egregiously pretentious and had to force myself to the end as if swimming through a sea of mud and sh*t; Hornby liked it (all critics seem to be in agreement that McEwen is a brilliant writer) but found it "uneven." Both of us loved The Road.
So I was thrilled when Hornby actually found a novel that he loathed - so much so that he coyly, annoyingly refused to name it. (He provides a quote, so by googling you are able to figure out it's Light Years by James Salter.) Hornby listens to an excerpt from the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya's "A Russian Diary" on the radio one morning and it makes him think of Light Years. "A perfect day begins in death, in the semblance of death, in deep surrender," wrote Salter. Really? questions Hornby, who finds this deliberately imprecise and obfuscatory. Is that the same "death" of Politkovskaya's diaries? He wonders "whether the complication of language is in inverse proportion to the size of the subject under discussion," given that she is writing about the agonies of Russian lawlessness and despotism, and Salter is writing about rich people languidly musing about wine and Sartre.
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