Sad is the state of the publishing industry when an author of Katha Pollitt’s reputation has to buy her own books to manipulate the Amazon rating of her Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time. Even sadder is the reality that such authors continue to receive your paper’s attention, while countless small-publishing-world writers and their books are blatantly ignored. Sarah Dunant’s latest book received not one, but two reviews, and then she received more space to respond to her bad review. How about my Maddalena? It's as good or bad a book as the paper reviews.

I've now made it a habit to look for lousy reviews of books--or should I say fine reviews of lousy books--published because the author had a fine precedent, whatever that means. Quality? Dollar signs? His godmother is a celebrity? Sorry, if you find my tone sarcastic, but after seeing my book classified as "truly dreadful," that is without being read, my thoughts have become less and less veiled.

Here's Michiko Kakutani's review, in today's Arts section:

Here are the ingredients of Scott Smith's preposterous new screenplay, er, novel [The Ruins]: a plot patched together from Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King ...

And on the books characters: Their personalities, their beliefs, their decion making, their hubris or lack of it: none of this matters when the enemy is an implacable and inhuman foe like the Killer Vines, who not only try to ensnare all of Mr. Smith's characters, but also succeed in choking his novel to death.

Another lucky author who GOT REVIEWED in the Big Paper. Since I value Ms. Kakutani's taste, and even more her opinion, I think I will pass on this one.

Cheers.

Posted by Eva Siroka at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2006

Paragone

Today, I’d like to share my ongoing confusion about the meaning of books to different people. This blog is about paragone, the Italian word, a comparison, and the idea of a writer’s paragon as seen in two novels with identical subject, but completely different approach.

More importantly, I'd like to know what does the label "historical novel" mean to different people.

When Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia first caught my attention in 2003, I quickly decided that it was not for me. Va bene, as her Artemisia would say.

I saw a pleasant cloud of words. If mingled with new names of characters and places, and tossed in the wind, it would have instantly produced a new book.

In 2003, Alexandra Lapierre’s Artemisia already sat quietly on my shelf, a book so rich in compelling narrative, that the moment I finished it, and had admired the illustrations, I reread it cover-to-cover.

Yes, the book was that compelling.

My hat off, Ms. Lapierre, I said, wondering how many reviewers and readers would agree with me, even more so now, since I decided to buy Ms. Vreeland’s book, and have read it in one quick sitting.

I adore historical novels. I’ve loved them for forty years plus. With each carefully selected title, another piece of a puzzle settles into the framework of my mind.

With Alexandra Lapierre’s book, I could have been the scribe at the heroine’s trial, and not even have blushed at the incredibly obscene language captured by my quill, as it has been “an integral part of the way men communicated in seventeenth-century Italy.” I instantly understood the period’s mentality and about men's rights.

Had I been Artemisia’s invisible biographer and followed her more faithfully than her shade, I could not have captured a more accurate, literary, compelling, breathtaking tale of her life.

The reviewers’ recommendations were solid.

No wonder: Ms. Lapierre uses the actual words spoken by her historical protagonists, backing them by a doggedly solid roster of documents. For example, Part II, Judith, the biblical heroine so often mentioned by Ms. Vreeland, has a subtitle: Rome in Scipione Borghese’s Day: 1611-1612. Chapter 15 takes place on Monday 14 May 1612; chapter 16, May to November 1611, etc. All this, with a stack of references, for a historical novel.

Here’s where Susan Vreeland’s book randomly opened for me today:

I heated water and washed my hair and Palmira’s in the stone sink.
“Ouch, you’re digging too hard,” she cried.
“Doesn’t it feel good to have your scalp scratched? Makes you feel more alive.”
“But you’re hurting me. Let me do it.”
Reluctantly, I stepped back to relinquish this pleasure of motherhood, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from the sweet, slender taper of the back of her soapy neck.

The passage wouldn’t quite fit the likes of Mary Queen of Scotts or Josephine Bonaparte. But can you see thousands and thousands heroines saying the same words, filling the blank pages of a novel--with what?

You tell me. Does this passage belong to the category of a historical novel? What is a historical novel?

Can the above passage be be considered “Haunting … stunning … exquisite moments,” as the Christian Science Monitor writes?

There are indeed some nice moments in Ms. Vreeland’s book, other than washing hair. There’s little Palmira, Artemisia’s daughter. I’m sure she might have been a cute little girl, growing like a weed. Like any child we women continue to bring forth into today's world with “our own groans.”

Painstaking details of paintings, descriptive passages, and then feelings that have nothing to do with history. And I wonder: WHO reads, labels, and reviews HISTORICAL FICTION?

On Ms. Vreeland’s book:

“Intelligent, searching, and unusual … it has a way of lingering in the reader’s mind.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“In borrowing from the news and focusing on a single looted piece of art, the novel performs its own revealing act of appropriation.”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“The novel sparkles without being shallow.”
—MARGARET GEORGE
Umm.

The New York Post finds Ms. Vreeland’s book “a work of art.”
Parade calls it “a little gem of a novel.”

288 pages cover some twenty-seven years of Artemisia’s life in Susan Vreeland’s book! Amazing. In fairy tales, heroes with magical boots flew over seven leagues in one step. Here, so little about seventeenth-century Rome, Florence, Naples, Genoa, London is understood, far, far less one might have gleaned from a guide book: Brunelleschi’s ribbed dome, Michelangelo’s scowling David, milk-white oxen still gracing Rome’s countryside, colorful details of Genoese harbor. Then descriptions of paintings interpolate feelings:

[Masaccio’s] Adam covered his bowed face with his hands. Eve’s eyes were wounded hollows nearly squeezed shut, and her open mouth uttered an anguished cry that echoed through time and resounded in my heart. The pathos of their shame moved me ...

And fashion. As I read another description about slashed puffy sleeves, I wondered if these details were removed, what would be left of the novel?

So much carefully orchestrated fluff, to make ones heart quiver for the brave heroine, what might otherwise be good historical narrative.

Is it a privileged glimpse into an extraordinary woman’s soul, as Margaret George announces on the back cover? Perhaps a sweet glimpse into the soul of any brave heroine.

La dolce vita. Or is it porca miseria?
So many cute Italian words to endear Ms. Vreeland’s novel to the reader.

I prefer clean historical facts magically blended into a plot. Like in As Above, So Below, a book that flies on the solid carpet of facts.

Why are so many novels are called historical, when they’re not? Can you help? Anyone? Please?

Posted by Eva Siroka at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2006

The Greenmanreview and Maddalena: De gustibus non est disputandum

Dear reader, there is no accounting for taste.
There are Reviewers, and there are reviewers.
Taste in books is so personal.

In one of my previous entries, I reflect on two New York Times reviews of In the Company of the Courtesan, and the author’s reaction to them. You might find it interesting.

Donna Bird’s reviews posted on greenmanreview.com are some of the most pedantic I’ve ever read, and admirable (do read the preface to the review, after finishing my blog!). With the stealthiness of Miss Marple and the steadfastness of Hercule Poirot, her intelligent eye and keen mind poke, examine, and deliver.

It’s too bad that her endurance does not appear to match her other gifts! At least not long enough to have perused Maddalena’s table of contents or to have skimmed through Credo, Nemesis, or Inferno, three chapters embodying the spirit of late sixteenth-century ecclesiastic Rome! They have nothing in common with the early voyeuristic chapters reflecting on a prelate, the life-time career (more than fifty-years-long) of the second-in-command after the pope, someone who did not take his sacred vows for thirty years.

Ms. Bird’s biting commentary of Maddalena, comparing the book to The Da Vinci Code, reflects not only a particular taste, but also a state of mind.

Thanks much for the compliment. I did enjoy Dan Brown’s liberal interpretation of facts and fables, and his poking at the Roman Catholic Church. And reviewers and readers enjoy my book.

I congratulate Ms. Bird on her first Grinch Award, perhaps cemented by her “Oh, gross” comment, a response to Cardinal Alessandro’s sexual reaction to his pawing the statue of Venus. Aparently Ms. Bird prefers more natural descriptive passages in historical fiction, for example: “She said nothing, but drew him into an alleyway and parted her cloak. The mist isolated them in an instant. He shuddered between her legs, staring into her eyes…” She certainly didn’t pick on that aspect in her review of Ms. Lovric’s The Floating Book. It is full of wine and roses.

I’d say the passage is not gross. It’s plain vulgar. And then it ends with: “Tears transpired on his cheeks.”

Doesn't that fill you with true emotion?

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Along with a glass of wine, my unchaste prelate, Alessandro Farnese, does indeed offer pork, cheese, and oysters to a Jewish woman. Mine was a careful choice. When Venus calls, a man’s brain may indeed descend between his legs.

As for the wine, Ms. Lovic’s sentence: “So do you have some red wine, Mister Nobleman” is surely ridiculous, at best. Yet, once again, it seems acceptable to the pedantic reviewer, as written in a novel set in the latter half of fifteenth-century Venice.

Umm. My titles of dignitaries and nobility are boringly rooted in period documents.
Apologia. So are so many passages that lack contemporary parlance. So sorry.

Reverendissimo signor padrone mio, verster servus humilis.

The poor General of the Jesuits had to humble himself to the man who controlled the strings for building the first Jesuit church in Rome. A difficult task. Must also be difficult to sweeten any unsavory dish, even just a bit; Ms. Bird does that handsomely for Ms. Lovric’s latest, not so accomplished, literary contribution.

Ooh. Reviewers, the humble servants of big publishers?
And small publishers? Are they beneath contempt? Apparently.

As someone “not steeped in the culture and traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and not comfortable referring to anyone as 'Him',” she is also unable to understand other aspects of Maddalena. The book’s illustrations that “remind her of the artwork she did when she was in her early teens, the last time she really did any drawing” (bravissima!) are de facto faithful interpretations of sixteenth-century compositions and graphic art.

Lucretia’s drawing, for example, is based on a study attributed, unjustly perhaps, to one Luca Cambiaso, a study hidden in a dark drawer of a European graphic collection. The carpet page with Berti and Alba is based on a genuine Spranger drawing. He was the miniaturist to the Queen of France and employed by the cardinal’s famous miniaturist, Giulio Clovio. If their style evokes pictures from fairy tales, or illuminated manuscripts, so is the biblical ending of the book, a plea for a world where all creatures are equal.

As I already said, there is no accounting for taste.

And, not surprisingly, not all readers shared Ms. Bird’s view of The Floating Book. An Amazon reviewer found it “pretentious, but trashy--not much more than a particularly lurid Harlequin.”

Avanti.

I trust many of you will enjoy Maddalena. There are no good or bad reviews. There are reviews.

P.S. I forgot. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.
And in Maine, there are no “shore winds.”
Off-shorewinds, perhaps?
On-shore winds?
Miss Marple will understand.

Posted by Eva Siroka at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)