Saturday, November 08, 2008

An other Lazarus Project

[A] writer of severely limited register, a reductivist lacking the drive to delve deeper into precisely the characters she thought she knew best, whose times, sadly, came to suit her.
So why was this author's first novel to be published in English accepted as a masterpiece by the literary press? Tadzio Koelb exposes the wholesale abdication of critical responsibility in Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic.

2 comments:

  1. Very difficult to say if this is abdication, or simply consensus that the novel is in fact very good. Koelb suggests that it won awards because jurors wanted to right a historical wrong...I don't buy that critics en masse would compromise their judgment for this reason...or for any other...how would they benefit from doing this?

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  2. Poor lady. Maybe she just liked making up stuff. Maybe she made some money doing it. Maybe, I don't know, it fed her ego. Damned critical praise.

    Meg

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