Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Damning with faint praise II
As I have recorded in this space before, the "Briefly Noted" book reviews in the back of each issue of The New Yorker are a treasure trove of back-handed compliments and non-parody parodies. Here's my favorite from this week:
No. Seriously. Somebody actually read that novel, and then wrote that "briefly noted" review and then got it published on page 137 of the March 14, 2005 issue of The New Yorker.
Natural Novel, by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Zornitsa Hristova (Dalkey Archive; $12.50). Gospodinov's anarchic, experimental debut concerns a young writer, the narrator, whose marriage breaks up after his wife becomes pregnant by someone else. But this plot is little more than the framework for a lively assortment of fragments -- dreams, lists, projected attempts to write a novel entirely with verbs or a Bible for flies, and a chapter called "Towards a Natural History of the Toilet." Inevitably, a book that takes such risks occasionally falls on its face; some of Gospodinov's scatology feels self-conscious, and pop-culture references, presumably intended to seem wised-up and Western, come off as just the reverse. But the hits outnumber the misses, and there is something engaging about the novel's stubborn refusal to amount to anything. As the narrator announces, "My immodest desire is to mold a novel of beginnings, a novel that keeps starting, promising something, reaching page 17 and then starting again."
No. Seriously. Somebody actually read that novel, and then wrote that "briefly noted" review and then got it published on page 137 of the March 14, 2005 issue of The New Yorker.
2 Comments:
By 
Sluggo, at
Tue Mar 08, 11:53:00 PM:
By 
, at
Wed Mar 09, 07:36:00 AM:
I would read the novel. Ever read Rabelais?
- Levi
