'Tis said that much of the nature of a reviewer is revealed in a review - and thus it seems when Big Brother has a go at Wolf Hall. So folks, let's have a flow of revelation about interesting reviews on assorted arts. There have been, I think some blunders in the past.

How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.

It was a bit actually, but it sold well - eventually. Any offers as to the title of "such a book"?

The Bible?

A creditable guess, nordmann, but no.

Withering Slights?

Lady C?

Ferval gets the gold star.


Publication: Graham’s Lady’s Magazine (USA)
Date: July 1848
Reviewer: Anonymous
Title: Wuthering Heights

How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors….

The novel "Gather Ye Rosebuds" by Jeannette C. Nolan received pretty bad reviews but still sold enough copies to convince Paramount to make it into a movie in 1948. The resulting epic, billed as "Gone With The Wind" meets "Little Women" was entitled "Isn't It Romantic?".

Film critic Leonard Matlin's review has gone down in history as the shortest ever in print (Leonard Matlin's Movie Guide, published 2005). The entire article was one word - "No".

On A A Milne - but who?

Quote :

The House at Pooh Corner proved to be one pot of honey too many, especially when Pooh revealed that he added the "tiddely pom" to his Outdoor Song "to make it more hummy": "And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

That's Dorothy Parker.

George MacDonald Fraser's first Flashman was so well researched that some reviewers thought it was the real thing.  

Quote :

Fraser was so skilled as a mock memoirist that he had some early readers fooled. Writing in The New
York Times in 1969 after the first novel was published, Alden Whitman said:

"So far, 'Flashman' has had 34 reviews in the United States. Ten of these found the book to be genuine autobiography."

Jennifer O'Brien's review of Pippa Middleton's 2012 epic "Celebrate: A Year of Festivities for Families and Friends", which was ostensibly about how to plan parties, was brief and to the point. The first sentence in Middleton's book pays homage to her own bottom, so O'Brien's article began ...

"Ah yes, that famous arse appears in the opening line — and the rest of the book seems to consist of Pippa talking out of it."

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Lady C?

D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in Britain from publication in 1928 until the 1960s. In New York, just as a ban on the book was also being brought in in the US, Edmund Wilson of the The New Republic magazine wrote:

'This fine novel of D. H. Lawrence’s has been privately printed in Florence, and it is difficult and expensive to buy.'

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Although generally enthusiastic about the novel, Wilson qualified his praise by saying 'the poetic sincerity of the gamekeeper does not quite always save his amorous rhapsodies over certain plain old English terms from being funny at the wrong time'.

Lawrence himself, who despite falling victim to the critical opinion of others, was nevertheless equally opinionated. When asked what he thought of the works of other contemporary English novelists, replied - "I don't care a rush for any of them".

Not a review, but the prosecuting counsel's summation on the novel. "...when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"

Vizzer, quoting Wilson, wrote:

Wilson qualified his praise by saying 'the poetic sincerity of the gamekeeper does not quite always save his amorous rhapsodies over certain plain old English terms from being funny at the wrong time'.

Read Cold Comfort Farm and you'll never take D.H. Lawrence (or poor old Mary Webb) seriously again.


How D. H. Lawrence and Mary Webb Helped Build Cold Comfort Farm

Lawrence's The Rainbow is even worse than Lady C.. I defy anyone these days to read the former without being tempted to giggle a bit - all that thrusting of the determined plough into the soft, moist, yielding earth and the explosion of seeds into the grateful furrow. Thankfully, no sheep (see Exhibit E in Guardian article) involved (as far as I can remember). Exhibit E is - unbelievably - not a Stella Gibbons spoof!

PS

Alas, "spoof" is not allowed these days - here is a sort of review(?) of Cold Comfort Farm:

Stella Gibbons's "Cold Comfort Farm" (1932) has been an incredibly popular novel. Its most famous line, "I saw something nasty in the woodshed," has become a catchphrase, and the book has sold in large numbers since its first publication in 1932. It has been adapted as a stage play, a musical, a radio drama, and two films, thereby reaching a still larger audience. However, its status within the academically-defined literary canon is comparatively low. One full article on Cold Comfort Farm was published in 1978, and since then, only a few paragraphs of criticism have been devoted to the novel. Critics apparently do not consider Cold Comfort Farm to be properly "literary," and it is rarely mentioned in studies of the literature of the interwar years. This is curious because Cold Comfort Farm is an extremely sophisticated and intricate parody whose meaning is produced through its relationship with the literary culture of its day and with the work of such canonical authors as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brönte. The novel's engagement with the gender issues of the 1930s also repays detailed examination.

Engagement with gender issues?  Crikey. I expect someone has written a deadly serious thesis on the choice of names for the cows at Cold Comfort: they are, in no particular order, Feckless, Aimless, Pointless and Graceless. The bull, who is actually rather lazy and useless (he spends all his time being depressed in the barn), is called Big Business. I wonder what Gibbons herself would make of the suggested "detailed examination" of her "engagement with gender issues"?