Monday, October 27, 2003
If I could be granted a wish by a genie to become a New York Times bestselling author, would I want to do it knowing that Dale Peck was out there? Talk about slamming an author:
"The Black Veil is the worst of Rick Moody's very bad books.... The plain truth is that I have stared at pages and pages of Moody's prose and they remain as meaningless to me as the Korean characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant. Actually, the comparison is not particularly apt, because I know that the Korean writing means something, but I am not convinced that Moody's books are about anything at all." -- Dale Peck The rest of Peck's scathing review
I can only imagine how Peck would tear up The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason, a book I just finished... With 53 reviews in on Amazon's Customer Review page, The Piano Tuner boasts a four out of five star rating. Not bad for a 27-year-old med student with a curriculum vitae most of us can only dream of. Here's my review:
I give the book a TWO. Mechanically, Mason keeps his writing Lego-block simple and I admire the fact that he doesn't try to wade into literary waters he is most obviously not ready to swim... Unfortunately this makes for tedious reading at times, especially for someone like me who loves the tap-dancing prose of a Salman Rushdie or John Irving. In fact on more than one occasion I felt like I was reading someone's high school creative writing paper. But Mason has obviously done his homework and so what he lacks in lyrical aptitude he at least makes up for in imparting a rich history of 19th century Burma along with everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-an-Erand-piano but were afraid to ask.
The stylistic shortcomings of the book don't bother me nearly so much as the review hype on the back cover -- I seriously wonder whether these critics actually ever read the book they have been assigned or if instead some grunt intern doesn't just hand them a one-page summary of the book after which the reviewer reaches down to the bottom of his/her velvet-adjective-sack and like fairy dust, sprinkles a few choice (completely arbitrary) descriptive words onto the back of the dust jacket. I say this because 'seductive' (NY Times), 'gripping' (USA Today), 'profound' (The New Yorker), 'luminous' (LA Times), this book is NOT. It's a quiet, well-researched book; the meat-and-potato prose follows a boring English piano-tuner-chap -- one, who having spent his whole life 'tuning' pianos scattered throughout the parlors of London, has also managed to 'tune out' the great big world he now beholds in astonished wonder. Not surprisingly, he is reluctant to go back to the wife and fog he has left behind -- or to use a pun: back to the same old tune. All in all a pretty good first book to come out of a now 27-year-old med student. However, the book is certainly not of the caliber the reviewers would have us believe.
"The Black Veil is the worst of Rick Moody's very bad books.... The plain truth is that I have stared at pages and pages of Moody's prose and they remain as meaningless to me as the Korean characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant. Actually, the comparison is not particularly apt, because I know that the Korean writing means something, but I am not convinced that Moody's books are about anything at all." -- Dale Peck The rest of Peck's scathing review
I can only imagine how Peck would tear up The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason, a book I just finished... With 53 reviews in on Amazon's Customer Review page, The Piano Tuner boasts a four out of five star rating. Not bad for a 27-year-old med student with a curriculum vitae most of us can only dream of. Here's my review:
I give the book a TWO. Mechanically, Mason keeps his writing Lego-block simple and I admire the fact that he doesn't try to wade into literary waters he is most obviously not ready to swim... Unfortunately this makes for tedious reading at times, especially for someone like me who loves the tap-dancing prose of a Salman Rushdie or John Irving. In fact on more than one occasion I felt like I was reading someone's high school creative writing paper. But Mason has obviously done his homework and so what he lacks in lyrical aptitude he at least makes up for in imparting a rich history of 19th century Burma along with everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-an-Erand-piano but were afraid to ask.
The stylistic shortcomings of the book don't bother me nearly so much as the review hype on the back cover -- I seriously wonder whether these critics actually ever read the book they have been assigned or if instead some grunt intern doesn't just hand them a one-page summary of the book after which the reviewer reaches down to the bottom of his/her velvet-adjective-sack and like fairy dust, sprinkles a few choice (completely arbitrary) descriptive words onto the back of the dust jacket. I say this because 'seductive' (NY Times), 'gripping' (USA Today), 'profound' (The New Yorker), 'luminous' (LA Times), this book is NOT. It's a quiet, well-researched book; the meat-and-potato prose follows a boring English piano-tuner-chap -- one, who having spent his whole life 'tuning' pianos scattered throughout the parlors of London, has also managed to 'tune out' the great big world he now beholds in astonished wonder. Not surprisingly, he is reluctant to go back to the wife and fog he has left behind -- or to use a pun: back to the same old tune. All in all a pretty good first book to come out of a now 27-year-old med student. However, the book is certainly not of the caliber the reviewers would have us believe.
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