JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Which (apparently) well-respected books have you finished and wondered why you bothered? Wondered what all the fuss was about?
I don't mean books you thought were bad or you just didn't like but books with reputations for profundity and wisdom that left you baffled as to why anyone would find any kind of deep meaning in their pathetic, puddle deep shallowness.
I've just finished Being There by Jerzy Kosinski. Let's look at the reviews on the back:
“Kosinski is one of the handful of important writers to arrive since the war... Being There is dense with enough images, complexities and ironies to keep scholars busy long past their graduation... the laughter he evokes from us is both a purgative - and a warning’
LIFE
“Being There is a reverse parable, highly polished and patterned to the last twitch of the nerves. It is a highly effective send-up of the metaphor world, where growth and seed-corn, are the familiar jargon of the concrete jungle”
THE GUARDIAN
“Not until you put the book down do you realize how chilling is the image of ourselves in Kosinski’s mirror... it will survive as a seminal work of the seventies?
SATURDAY REVIEW
I am very familiar with these reviews because I kept turning the book over to look at them them. I was trying to work out how they could possibly be about the same book I was reading.
Being There is a very thin book, just 110 pages in the Black Swan edition in front of me (and shortly to be available cheap on eBay). The text starts on page 9 and ends on page 106. There are 15 blank pages in between as each chapter gets a whole new leaf to separate it from the one before it. The thing is only 80 pages long. At a rough guess at 40 lines a page and 9 words a line (I'm being generous and assuming the text on every page reaches the bottom and is densely written with no dialogue) some 30k words. Hardly a novel.
Far from being dense with 'images, complexities and ironies' it's very thin story about a innocent abroad who, after a contrived meet cute, mingles with the rich and famous - all of whom, to a man, assume his limited repertoire of Forest Gump-like gardening banalities are deeply profound. No consequences of these misapprehensions lead anywhere other than that person introducing him to someone else to make the same mistake. And that's it. End of story.
So ****ing what?!
Other books that have done the same for me are:
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
I don't mean books you thought were bad or you just didn't like but books with reputations for profundity and wisdom that left you baffled as to why anyone would find any kind of deep meaning in their pathetic, puddle deep shallowness.
I've just finished Being There by Jerzy Kosinski. Let's look at the reviews on the back:
“Kosinski is one of the handful of important writers to arrive since the war... Being There is dense with enough images, complexities and ironies to keep scholars busy long past their graduation... the laughter he evokes from us is both a purgative - and a warning’
LIFE
“Being There is a reverse parable, highly polished and patterned to the last twitch of the nerves. It is a highly effective send-up of the metaphor world, where growth and seed-corn, are the familiar jargon of the concrete jungle”
THE GUARDIAN
“Not until you put the book down do you realize how chilling is the image of ourselves in Kosinski’s mirror... it will survive as a seminal work of the seventies?
SATURDAY REVIEW
I am very familiar with these reviews because I kept turning the book over to look at them them. I was trying to work out how they could possibly be about the same book I was reading.
Being There is a very thin book, just 110 pages in the Black Swan edition in front of me (and shortly to be available cheap on eBay). The text starts on page 9 and ends on page 106. There are 15 blank pages in between as each chapter gets a whole new leaf to separate it from the one before it. The thing is only 80 pages long. At a rough guess at 40 lines a page and 9 words a line (I'm being generous and assuming the text on every page reaches the bottom and is densely written with no dialogue) some 30k words. Hardly a novel.
Far from being dense with 'images, complexities and ironies' it's very thin story about a innocent abroad who, after a contrived meet cute, mingles with the rich and famous - all of whom, to a man, assume his limited repertoire of Forest Gump-like gardening banalities are deeply profound. No consequences of these misapprehensions lead anywhere other than that person introducing him to someone else to make the same mistake. And that's it. End of story.
So ****ing what?!
Other books that have done the same for me are:
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
