Life happened because I turned the pages~~Alberto Manguel

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Monday, August 23, 2004

The Tree Bride Gets the Axe

"To be Michikoed": to be either praised or slaughtered by the ever-so-slightly-predictable and very influential New York Times reviewer.
Latest victim: Bharati Mukherjee's The Tree Bride.
Method of execution: hatchet, blunt-edged. Count the adjectives: "Ponderous", "bloated", "discursive", "long, stilted", "swollen, ungainly", "preposterous", "flawed".
The Babu has long since been guiltily aware that he should make the appropriate appreciative noises about Bharatidi; pioneering writer of the diaspora, sensitive portrayals etc etc. But he has bitter memories of trying, and failing, to wade through Jasmine and has never been able to read BM since. It's nice to have his opinion validated.
Oh, I forgot: "maladroit".

posted by Hurree | 8/23/2004 01:36:00 AM

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2 Comments:

Yeah, I read it and winced, too.

Only comfort was that the Great Michiko once again said "limned". What's with her and that bloody word?

Now, I've been wanting to like Mukherjee for a long time (beautiful woman, wonderful talker, all the usual superficial reasons), but by all accounts she's not that great a writer. Still, as a scribbler myself, it stings to see a throughly negative review splashed all over the paper of record.

elck

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8/23/2004 02:26:00 AM  

Elck, you raise an interesting issue: should reviewers write for the reader or with the writer at least partially in mind? If it's with the latter, then a little kindness, a small acknowledgement that any book, however flawed, might have taken great effort is in order.
While I don't always agree with Michiko's takedowns, and did think this review was less analytical than dismissive, I also think that a reviewer has a responsibility to be honest. And that she was. She saw what she considered very bad writing and terrible plotting, and said it was awful: as a reader, she made my job that much easier, frankly.
I'm saying this in part because I was sent an advance proof of The Tree Bride by a reviewer-friend, and it was truly terrible: turgid and over-dramatic and utterly unbelievable, at least as far as I managed to get. I'm kind of glad that Michiko slaughtered the book and saved me the trouble of trying to wade through the rest of it, frankly. Living and working in India, we often see books by Indian writers praised abroad for all the wrong reasons: because they "open up" the subcontinent, because they're "exotic", because they offer a specious sort of User's Guide to the country. It's quite irritating when those books are praised, as they often are by Western critics, without any attempt at a deeper reading. In that context, Michiko's review was refreshing for its absence of cultural cringe.

By Blogger Hurree, at 8/23/2004 12:51:00 PM  

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