The short and the long

The Literary Saloon – or as I like to call it “We’re curious to see” � provides links to the Dalkey Archive’s excellent new selection of short reviews. There are dozens of them! We’re Curious to See says the selection overlaps their own coverage. It would mine too, if I covered them. Writing reviews has become too problematic for me. I find that a planned review will be either too short or too long. Case in point: in the 36th review, Amy Havel provides a 330 word review of Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations. It’s a fine summary and might prompt a potential reader to seek it out. Yet such summary also seems to be a brutal fencing in, a snipping of a novel’s wings. The reader can see it in a box and move on. There are too many ideological blindspots. A good example of this � enjoyable and distressing at the same time � can be seen in Rotten Tomatoes‘ two-page selection of wildly-differing quotes from reviews of the great, beautiful, epoch-resisting film Eloge de l’Amour, by Jean-Luc Godard. The hostility of the majority of the reviews says more about each reviewer � someone constituted by cultural ideology to the point of barely existing as an autonomous human being – than the film. But if one tries to unpack things, one ends up writing too much. My review of the same Goldberg: Variations is nearly 2500 words long. Perhaps too long. In both cases, one wonders what will make the reader read the book under review, if indeed that is the point.