Posted by Joffre on 23/9/2009, 12:57:09, in reply to "Re: The Vicar and the backs of books"
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I certainly hope you are right, Sterling. It seems to me that writers of the status of Atwood and Updike have their own reputations to think of. It is, of course, possible for good writers to judge books wrongly. Or at least it's possible that the books they championed will turn out to be period pieces.
The blurb business rarely matters to me. I never really go browsing shelves. I learn of books from other authors and things like The Western Canon and the NLtRP. Mostly.
Sometimes the blurbs have come from books like that. I want to read No Tomorrow by by Dominique Vivant. I think the book has on the cover a comment from Kundera. That comment comes from The Art of the Novel.
I don't bring up Snow to annoy Lale, and I hope I don't annoy her. I am just curious about Snow. I wonder what its reputation will be. I didn't have any strong feelings about it, and if I did, I wouldn't judge the book on my feelings. As the person who can't appreciate Shakespeare, I assume my critical sense is just about nil. It is precisely for a book like Snow that the blurbs do interest me, and I hope that whether they are right or wrong, Atwood and Updike were sincere.
Here is something I intended to include in my original post: My copy of Jacques the Fatalist has this comment on the back, "Your Jacques is a tasteless mishmash of things that happen, some of them true, others made up, written without style and served up like a dog's breakfast." As I half expected, this turned out to be a quote from the book itself.
I'll be checking out the Pynchon list.
