Stunning … Extraordinary!

Posted 25 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing |

I was startled to pick up a copy of the trade paperback edition of Craig Davidson’s novel The Fighter and find my own words staring back at me. Specifically, the back cover blurb, attributed to the Quill & Quire (where my review of the book originally ran) and not to me personally, reads as follows: “The Fighter is a tough, brutal, blood-soaked book that leaves its reader feeling pummelled, battered, and beaten, but nonetheless strangely exhilarated.”

I was happy to see my comment used, since it was a fairly accurate summation of my feelings about the book, but it’s nevertheless a somewhat disorienting experience to have your words crop up in a context other than the one in which you intended them.

Some reviewers enjoy seeing their names appended to books and advertisements, since they are able to bask in a kind of reflected glory as a result. Certain reviewers even seem to craft their reviews for the sole purpose of providing ready-made quotes that the publisher can excerpt on subsequent editions of the book under review.

I’ve never written this way, in large part because I’m leery of having my words taken out of context and distorted to serve someone else’s ends. A review of 350 words, such as the Quill review of Davidson’s novel, has by necessity to be incredibly compact and concentrated; the reviewer doesn’t have a lot of space to get the point across, and must pay strict attention to the language and context of the commentary, since there’s not really room to clarify or qualify the judgements being rendered. As a result, when taken out of the context of the review proper, any single sentence or phrase can potentially be made to take on a different meaning or tenor from what was intended.

Zach Wells nicely sums up the dangers inherent in having pieces of a review appropriated for publicity purposes:

I have an intense distaste for the blurb qua literary sub-genre, but one can’t prevent someone else from quoting you.* In the cases of [John] Smith and [George] Johnston, I was pleased to find out I’d been quoted, since I genuinely admire both poets’ work and the excerpt was in tune with my overall opinion. But I’ve also been quoted in publisher publicity bumph, completely out of context, an ellipses eliding the true substance of my commentary.

This is where blurbing gets truly dodgy. A reviewer will write, “So-and-so’s book is a triumph of faulty thinking and poor logic. Its intense lack of focus is only equalled by its extraordinary bastardization of the English language.” Then that reviewer will pick up the paperback edition of the book and see this: “A triumph … intense … extraordinary!”

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

*Case in point. Sorry, Zach.

6 comments to “Stunning … Extraordinary!”

Zachariah Wells, September 27th, 2007 at 2:14 pm:

• Not only did you quote me, you edited me! Bastard.

Steven W. Beattie, September 27th, 2007 at 3:09 pm:

• Oops. I did mean to include the authors’ first names, for clarity, but my mistyping of “bumph” was a mistake. Apologies.

Steven W. Beattie, September 27th, 2007 at 3:13 pm:

• Oh, and the phantom “both.” And the s’ on publishers’. Fuck, what kind of drugs was I on when I typed that? I need an editor.

jpz, September 28th, 2007 at 12:35 pm:

• I’m making myself available to edit misleadingly fulsome blurbs. My rate scales up per the publisher’s requirements: fulsome +1, fulsome +2, etc., etc. Goes to 11.

Zachariah Wells, September 30th, 2007 at 2:51 am:

• You mean you re-type shit when you quote it? What are you using, a Smith Corona?? CTRL-C. CTRL-V.

Steven W. Beattie, September 30th, 2007 at 11:02 am:

• I’ve tried that, but some sites (I won’t say which ones …) reformat block quotes when I import them. So I’m reduced to retyping them, which I don’t think I’ve done since my university days. Clearly I’m rusty …

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