Posted by Lale on 23/9/2009, 9:06:26, in reply to "Re: The Vicar and the backs of books"
174.115.190.162
I agree with what’s been said before. The authors may be friends, there may be pressure from the publisher … And sometimes authors may genuinely think that a book was worthy enough to endorse (and sometimes they are known to change their minds later on.)
The industry always protects itself. When we lived in Paris, I used to watch fashion shows put on by world-famous designers. In the audience, there would be other designers, also world-famous. At the end of the show the ones in the audience would have nothing but extreme praise for the show’s designer, their competition.
Maybe in the publishing world, there is that kind of bondage, a camaraderie.
Also, some of what is said is taken completely out of context for the back of the book. For instance, when Hemingway wrote a review of the Great Gatsby, he did not have many positive things to say (I think he was jealous). While criticizing the book, he said something to the effect of “it is amazing how some of it is so good,” meaning that most of it was not good. This was taken out of its context and placed on the book as a praise.
If you look at some of quotations (not necessarily on the back cover but in the first few pages of books), they consist of just a couple of words, not even entire sentences. Clearly the rest of the sentence was not flattering.
For me, the most disappointing endorsement was that of Isabel Allende’s for The Kite Runner. In my eyes she lost all credibility.
As for the good stuff that has been said for Orhan Pamuk’s snow, here is John Updike’s review of it, published in the New Yorker in 2004:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crbo_books
John Updike, within the first paragraph of his review of Snow, finds references to Proust, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky, Italo Calvino, James Joyce and Raymond Queneau. Then towards the end of his review, he can’t resist another comparison, this time to Hemingway.
- Like Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,”
- goes by the name of Ka, a hard-to-miss allusion to Kafka’s K., the hero of “The Castle.”
- debate-prone microcosm of Thomas Mann’s sanatorium in “The Magic Mountain,”
- with a lethal whiff of Dostoyevsky’s unnamed “our town” in “The Possessed.”
- Like Italo Calvino, Pamuk has a passion for pattern-making;
- he maps Kars as obsessively as Joyce did Dublin
- Like Raymond Queneau, Pamuk is gifted with a light
- an enigmatic bleakness, traceable perhaps to Hemingway
Wow!
I’d like to think that Margaret Atwood was sincere, but one never knows.
Both Updike and Atwood said that Orhan Pamuk deserved the nobel prize (before he got it). Orhan Pamuk is known to possess a very strong network, a very powerful lobby. There may be political, religious or financial infrastructures of this very powerful network to which he owes the Nobel prize. People like Updike and Atwood mentioning Pamuk’s name in association with the Nobel a couple years before he actually got it (especially when Atwood herself was one of the contenders) may be because they were somehow touched by the Pamuk-lobby.
Lale
