Sometimes a book reviewer so hates an author’s style, the review itself becomes an example of tawdry lit. The excess and purplocity with which they fling literary feces have the hi-lo appeal of Simon Cowell berating Hermione Granger in a library. Check out these angry yet entertaining reviews of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. (Where’s Michiko Kakutani?)

First, the NY Sun’s Stefan Beck on Earth:

Reviewing a book by Jhumpa Lahiri is like throwing pebbles at an elephant [because of her selling power]… the unaccustomed earth is in fact disappointingly familiar territory… her dramatis personae boil down to treacle in a melting pot of largely unmemorable frustrations and tragedies… to discover another Gogol, Ms. Lahiri… just might need to get out more…

[One story] includes great dialogue, which… doesn’t exist in abundance in this book. Nor humor… In Ms. Lahiri’s three books, the only line that deserves a chuckle [is] from the title story of Interpreter of Maladies… Lahiri has an abstemious relationship to pleasure, which is more or less confined to sexual passion, often adulterous, and food… Someone is always preparing samosas or a cassoulet… Younger women are “entered” expertly… like soft-core for the Park Slope playground set…

… all the Indian line-prep is just a slightly exotic play on the kind of Independence Day barbecue that would bore the living Bud Light out of American readers. When you get past the imported ingredients, you find that the “human condition” can be pretty dull in the wrong hands… [The prose] can be wooden… half her characters are busy accruing degrees and writing dissertations… their epiphanies tacked on neatly at the end… [Link]

Second, the Times of London’s Peter Kemp on Enchantress:

… this novel’s farrago of… albino giants, phantoms, “potato witches”, magic mirrors, miraculous perfumes and telepathic bathwater… why [would] any author wishing to be taken seriously… put his name to such stuff[?] … by a long chalk, [this novel is] the worst thing he has ever written. Fiendish tortures… are shudderingly mentioned… [and are] more than rivalled by the book’s repertoire…

Merciless authorial garrulity is unleashed… The penchant for silly-sounding names… (Nadia, Fadia and Kapadia Wadia…) resurfaces with a trio called Otho, Botho and Clotho… fantasy deserves better than to be used as a safe-conduct pass for melodramatic cliché… and reams of penny-dreadful prose. There are lines that churners-out of blood-and-thunder grand guignol would blush to acknowledge: “His hair was long and black as evil and his lips were full and red as blood”… The prose often looks as if it has been scissored out of some antiquated historical novelette: “In the sanctum of the great courtesan, the city’s grandees were asleep, sated, in déshabillé on velvet couches, their limbs flung wantonly across the prone bodies of naked hetaerae”…

… by the time you reach the end of this novel with its garish banalities and depthless sensationalisms, what you’re most aware of are the 1,001 ways in which it would have been more… enjoyable to pass the time… Only rarely does Rushdie find scope for the quick, cartoonish vividnesses of description that are his forte… As a parched traveller drinks deep from a gourd, “the water ran down from the edges of his mouth and hung on his shaven chin like a liquid beard”… [Link]

Of course, Lahiri is a minimalist while Rushdie rolls baroque. The very garrulousness which Kemp despises is what I love about Rushdie’s work.

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