How Not To Write a Book Review
Have you had a bad review lately?
Slate poetry editor, Robert Pinsky, considers what happened to John Keats and the review which, allegedly, killed him.
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Kafka called literature an axe that breaks open the frozen sea inside us. His sentence describes the liberation and discovery of genuine art. It also holds a diagnosis: we are beings in need of breaking open, if we are to know the full dimensions of who we are. In his works, Kafka drew portraits not just of individuals but of an age still recognizably our own. The frozen sea is not only an individual prison, it is the quality of a culture in which, as the Siberian herders might say, certain powerful but stupid gods hold sway. It is not necessary here to name them, the list would be long and also boring. But one can say this much: these cultural forces do not want us to find our way to the serious depths. They want to keep us as they are: uni-dimensional and shallow and hungry only for a life of the surface. Jane Hirshfield
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I’ve only had one ever. By that I mean so far. A girl on Goodreads gave Living with the Truth a 1-star rating and all she said was she couldn’t finish it. That made me rather sad but I can’t imagine any review would be worth killing oneself over. My first two books are out as e-books now – the official notification goes up tonight – and so I’m going to be looking for some reviews from that community and I’ll be interested to see what I get. From what I can see most e-book only authors tend to work in genres and I have no idea how you would classify what I do. I suspect a few might not be on the same page as me but we’ll see.
I have drafted a book from the point of view of an 12 year old boy and asked some children at a local school to review it (without revealing my identity). Got some good reviews but also this: I hated how you thought you were being funny and you were not.
Also: ‘Dieabolikal’.
So that told me.
‘Dieabolikal’ should win some kind of prize. Best thing I heard all day.
It goes to show that different people have different tolerance. It’s how much you put your heart on your work and yet despite your effort, it’s not good enough. I can’t blame anybody doing this but it’s really not worth dying for me at least.