Critiquing the critic
Why NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani can’t abide Salman Rushdie:
Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize [her own] prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and superfluous adjectives like savvy and embarrassing…
The qualities most glaringly missing from Kakutani’s work are humor and wit. Maybe in an attempt to compensate, she writes one or two parody reviews a year… They are so awful, from start to finish, that you cannot avert your eyes, much as you would like to. [Link]
See also the classics ‘Limning Michiko Kakutani,’ about Kakutani’s favorite word (we all have ‘em), and ‘I Am Michiko Kakutani,’ in which classmate Colin McEnroe claims to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic.
on Saturday, May 10th, 2008, 8:50 am in Literature, Salman Rushdie › 
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I have heard that in her own Thesaurus, her name appears as a synonym for Bitch.
One of the problems with being THE REVIEWER OF BOOKS FOR THE VAUNTED blah blah is that no one can like everything. No one can have a feel for everything. It just doesn’t work that way.
I’ve never read any Rushdie, and, frankly, the reviews I read don’t make me want to read any of it. It’s just not my thing, although, I could change my mind. You never know. Maybe it’s just not her thing? In that case, you have to accept your limitations, I think, and review the parts of it you can grasp.
Anyway, one of the joys of being a nobody is that you don’t have to read books you don’t want to read! Yeah!
Okay, I googled an excerpt of Shalimar the Clown and read a bit of it. What does it mean to sleep badly through warm, unsurprising nights? I dunno. Maybe I will read it in the future. We’ll see.
*This is not to be taken as saying he’s a good or bad writer. What do I know? Who am I to know? I’m just saying whether I want to read it or not.
Nice post! Learnt a new word though am hard put to use it in a sentence :-). In my experience its always better to read a number of reviews before actually shelling out money to buy a book. There is a lot of the Michiko-myth going around but there are other equally worthwhile opinions. And for once, I do agree with Salman Rushdie, she does seem a bit limited in her approach to words.