My original reviews
of books mentioned in this essay can be located by typing author and title into
the search bar above.
I buy, read and review books, but not
always in that order: sometimes I imagine a review then track down the book. I
don’t hold library tickets so always have skin in the game, the unread books on
my shelves failed investments. The
rewards are the pleasures (but also irritations) of reading and the more
controllable pleasures of writing, to which is added such satisfaction as can
be got from Google’s page view counter.
A review in a print journal might lead
me to a book; as do footnote references and, latterly, a taste for reading and
re-reading classics. I browse in town
centre bookshops but that challenges my sensibilities. It’s the wallpaper. The garish
covers and lurid blurbs are the graphic design version of over-excited talk
shows. With exceptions (Penguin Classics
and Modern Classics, Fitzcarraldo) the current state of book cover art is
decidedly down market, comparing unfavourably with the stylish packaging of own
brand goods in supermarkets
Blurbs are less reliable than small
print food labels and not always to the advantage of the author. I have
accumulated a selection of trade misdescriptions and reprise three here:
Faber published Alex Preston’s In
Love and War (2017) and the reviewer at GQ made it onto cover
telling us that it’s a book for the beach, “the perfect read to pair with that
first sundowner”. I proceed to the novel: the hero Esmond dies horribly under Gestapo
torture and his lover Ada dies in a concentration camp. Gin and Auschwitz?
Really?
The
2018 Penguin paperback cover for Zadie Smith’s Swing Time quotes from a
review in The Observer claiming that the novel “Has brilliant things to say
about race, class and gender” which cuts Zadie Smith off at the ankles for a
book in which dancing plays a leading part; it puts her on a level with
Bernardine Evaristo. I did go to the original Observer review by Taiye
Selasi, more subtle than the blurb extract, but if you want to sample the
stunning prose of which Smith is capable - showing not saying - go to pages
321-30 of the paperback to find a beautifully structured and emotionally-charged scene set in a small
north London pizza joint.
In 2018 Penguin published Sally
Vickers’ The Librarian and Adam Phillips was there on cover noting that “Vickers
writes of relationships with undaunted clarity”. Well, I admire Adam Phillips
and he sealed the purchase. The quote is actually from a review of another book
by Vickers (Cousins) though as I started to read I could see how it
worked for this one too:
“ ‘ What would you wish for, Sylvia?’ But he
had stooped and was gathering her body to his, so she didn’t answer. “I have
wanted to do that since I met you in the foundry”’
I
felt like the victim of a Borat prank.
Adam Phillips was writing tongue in cheek and I had bought a Mills & Swoon.
*
Most
of us let that wonderful invention, Microsoft Word, run the writing show. There
are hazards, especially for pedants.
In
2020 Princeton University Press published an academic monograph on loan words
written by the British professor Richard Scholar. The cover of the book spells
out its topic: ÉMIGRÉS French Words that Turned English. It’s a clever
title because émigré is itself a loan word. But when I type it in lower case
Microsoft automatically supplies two diacritical marks. That’s surely wrong. As
an assimilated loan word emigré requires only that one diacritical mark to
guide us to acceptable pronunciation: think café and naïve and
compare with hotel which requires no guidance (those three words printed
now as Microsoft delivered them).
Microsoft also obliges with an accent on
capitalised CAFÉ though in French accents over capital letters are fairly optional.
For proof, google photographs of “typical Parisian café”. In short, if someone
asks whether written English uses diacritical marks, the correct answer
is Yes, but sparingly, thank goodness. And in French, Yes,
but the rules are a bit different for lower case and upper case. Don’t
ask me to be more precise because life is short. But on such matters Microsoft
can be plus royaliste que le roi. And Princeton University Press even
more so with two accents on capitalised EMIGRES which do not appear when I type
it. Dear Pedantic Reader, do you vote for two, one or no diacritical marks on
the capitalised word made from the letters E M I G R E S?
There are real issues about the currently
popular use of diacritical marks to render Roman alphabet versions of languages
which don’t use the Roman alphabet. It’s a genuine question whether they
undermine lazy colonialist mindsets or are themselves just a legacy of
colonialism. There is a good basis for a case study in the rendering of spoken
Yoruba in Oyinkan
Braithwaite’s accomplished novel My Sister, The Serial Killer (2019).
But hold fire; there is an App now in common
use by publishers, especially in the USA, which dumbs down texts, especially
academic ones. The App may have a human incarnation as a copy editor following
an inclusive rule book.
Richard Scholar’s book is an academic monograph
aimed at a small audience of readers familiar with French and English
literature especially of the eighteenth century. It severely tests my own knowledge. But at page 114 I
read this, “The French-speaking Genevan thinker and writer Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-78) ….”.
What has gone wrong? The App has spotted a proper name and
provided an explanatory gloss. Give it “William Shakespeare” and it would hand
back “The English-speaking Stratford-upon-Avon poet and playwright …” I guess
the idea is to get the book into the hands of 101 readers; but it won’t when
the book is not pitched at them. And for actual readers it is just bizarre and,
when repeated, reads as standardised patter which cuts across whatever personal
style the author may have. The App knows nothing of prosody and never reads
aloud to itself.
I can offer a hand proof that this App really is at work in
Scholar’s book. At page 162, the title of a sequence of poems is given in
untranslated French with no gloss that the words are those which the
French-speaking painter Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903) inscribed on his most famous
painting. Now that would be useful 101 stuff. But how come the gloss isn’t
there? In the immediate vicinity of this
bit of text there is no one’s name present to jolt the App into life.
*
Bad books get published; we all know that. But they are bad in
different ways. There are the books which read like drafts of Ph.Ds. In a
previous life, I was obliged to read such things; it’s a dirty job but somebody’s
got to do it. It’s exasperating to read a printed book where the work clearly hasn’t
been done. In 2011 Oxford University Press published Gerald Steinacher’s Nazis
on the Run - disjointed, repetitive, and inconclusive where it needs to be
decisive. The last problem was undoubtedly connected to problems of access (#openthevaticanarchives)
but it also involves care in choices between modal verbs and adverbs to ensure
that the text does not become simply evasive. Better to state clearly what the
important question is and record that in the present state of knowledge it
cannot be answered. In a Ph D, modality
matters.
Rather different is the case of the student who
has received criticism, records it, and then carries on as if nothing has
happened. In Emma Dabiri’s interesting Don’t Touch My Hair (2018) it
happens twice. There is a long rant about cultural appropriation (pages 178ff)
at the end of which the reader is offered “[Fred] Astaire is certainly worth
further consideration when discussing the important distinction between
appropriation and borrowing, the latter undoubtedly the basis of evolving
culture” (page 190). That is a tacked-on remark which goes nowhere, just passed
off as if duty done. In the second case, someone is actually quoted taking issue. The search
for “Roots” (forgive the pun) is problematic because it usually stops when
satisfying ones are found. Dabiri’s Africa is characterised by “wholeness” (a
word which belongs in a chain which goes down all the way to wholesome and wholegrain).
There isn’t much local violence in the African past which interests her and
none at all in the African present. Her history remains fairly firmly in the
realms of Uplifting Story, which publishers like. But she then quotes an email
from Ron Eglash who tries to draw her away from the Search for Roots toward
something more structural:
“The temptation is to dive into the competition over ‘who discovered it
first’. But that kind of competition is a framework created for Intellectual
Property rights…. Reversal never works. ‘We discovered it first’ is not a
rebuke of white supremacy, it is just adopting their tactics. That is what
Audre Lorde meant when she said, ‘ the master’s tools will never tear down the
master’s house’ (pages 216 - 17)
These words
just sit there. And the reader will no doubt go on calling out cultural
appropriation and searching for roots. I’m with Audre Lorde.
Then there are books which have clearly involved a lot of
googling and maybe not much else. As someone who likes to sit at home, I cannot
plausibly deny it. But it’s an art and you need to do it extremely well. Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk make it work
but we lesser artists easily fail. This
is true of Tiffany Watt Smith’s very short Schadenfreude (2018) which
though it has a German loan word for its title comes up in the text with “The
Genealogy of Morals written by the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche”. (Sound familiar?).
But now, as a standout example of modern internet-enabled
prose we have Peter Ackroyd’s cut and paste The English Soul (2024), a
sort of hardback Wikipedia into which Ackroyd’s contribution is concentrated as
a string of one-liners; I quote four and if you don’t like them there are
others quoted in the full review of the book
On Thomas More, “The burnings [of heretics] continued, shedding fitful
light on the English soul.” (page 73)
On the Authorized Version: “It might even act as a mirror of Englishness
itself, and by extension the English soul” (140)
On George Herbert: “Little Gidding became, for Herbert, a vision of
spirituality in the world. It became a corner of the English soul.” (147)
On William Blake: “Yet in truth his vision has never been lost. It is
integral to the English soul.” (240)
Well, bless my English soul. Trot it out often enough and it becomes
trite or simply vacuous.
*
Finally, there are translations which I do read. Nearly sixty years ago
I was given L’Etranger to help improve my schoolboy French. A girlfriend
who went on to become a Professor of French wanted to level me up. I thought to
speed the process by setting beside it a copy of Penguin’s The Outsider,
baffled to discover that the two texts didn’t seem to match up. I was unaware
that I had bought Stuart Gilbert’s Variations on a Theme by Albert Camus.
I have been wary ever since and when I’m going to read a book translated from
French I’ll usually buy the French to put alongside. In that way, I was able to
confirm that a sentence in the English translation of Annie Ernaux’s The Years
which made no sense does in fact invert the order of events in the French
original.
But what can you do when reading translations from languages you don’t
know? Well, it can be contextually obvious that all is not well. Ismail
Kadare’s The Concert (1988) was translated by Barbara Bray from the
French translation from the Albanian. Set in Communist Albania, the version I
read is peopled by Home Secretaries and Foreign Secretaries and one is
surprised not to find Whitehall in Tirana. What cultural blindness blocked the
use of Ministers of the Interior and Foreign Ministers? Out of the same failure
of imagination we find Albanian Communists under pressure giving vent to Phew! (page 137) What a ghastly day!
(139) and expressing frustration over the whole blessed evening (170). Unless
I’m missing something (it happens) the register is so obviously wrong that it
casts doubt on the whole translation. (Is there an Albanian reader out there
who can confirm or deny?)
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