Verity here. Every now and then I
cheer myself up by going and having a look at some notes I made from a book
entitled the Complete Rotten Reviews and
Rejections edited by Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard. I hope it’s still in
print…
LEWIS CARROLL’s Alice in Wonderland – ‘A stiffly overwrought story’
JOSEPH HELLER’s Catch 22 – (in the New York Times Book Review) – ‘It
gasps for want of craft and sensibility…there is nothing here to appease a
reader’s basic literary needs.’
PROUST’s Swann’s Way – ‘I can’t see why a chap should need 30 pages to
describe how he turned over in bed before going to sleep.’
NABAKOV’s Lolita – ‘A wild neurotic daydream that should have been buried
for a thousand years.’
GEORGE ORWELL’s Animal Farm – ‘It is impossible to sell
animal stories in the USA’
UPTON SINCLAIR’s The Jungle – ‘Fit only for the
wastebasket.’
W.B.YEATS – ‘The work does not
please the ear, does not kindle the imagination.’
LE CARRÉ – The Spy
Who Came In From The Cold – ‘You’re welcome to Le Carre – he hasn’t got any
future.’
T.S ELIOT’s The Wasteland (in The New
Statesman) – ‘Mr Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse;
but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and
imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.’
STEINBECK’s Of Mice and Men (in Time) –
‘An oxymoronic combination of the tough and the tender (which would appeal to) sentimental
cynics and cynical sentimentalists.’
GUNTER GRASS's The Tin Drum – ‘One feels like a zoologist who discovers some monstrous
unrecorded mammal gobbling leaves.’
WILLIAM FAULKNER’s As I Lay Dying (in The New York Times
Book Review) – ‘…a high place in an inferior category.’
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT’s Madame Bovary (in Le Figaro ) – ‘Monsieur
Flaubert is not a writer.’
LEO TOLSTOY’s Anna Karenina – ‘Sentimental rubbish…show me one page that contains
an idea.’
TRUMAN CAPOTE’s In Cold Blood – 'This isn’t writing. It’s
research.’
…And now that you’re all feeling
REALLY cheerful, take off those rabbit ears and get back to that writing desk! Mush! Mush!
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