Comments on: A Reader’s Diary: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and The Untelling by Tayari Jones

By: Patry

Patry — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 02:39:06 +0000

Any book that garners a two million dollar advance and a ton of hype is bound to be a disappointment. I’m tired of this one before opening page one.

By: gwenda

gwenda — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 01:39:42 +0000

Oh and yes, yes, yes: you must read Valiant. It’s SO great.

By: TEV

TEV — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 20:30:43 +0000

Heh heh … “tits up” … that’s gonna be the new TEV tagline. And JS&MN made me want to beat my head until my ears bled.

By: Abigail

Abigail — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:57:32 +0000

I liked Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, although I think the hoopla that surrounded it was excessive (not as egregious as in the case of The Historian, but still unwarranted) and that it would have benefitted from some editing. The thing that kept me going was Clarke's beautiful prose and her wonderful pastiche of the Regency novel. It truly felt credible to me that I was reading a book written several centuries ago, plus the footnotes and various digressions peppered throughout the book are just my thing. Not a perfect book by a long shot, but I enjoyed it. I actually ended up thinking about S&N while I was reading The Historian because it occurs to me that they might be part of a trend of gentrifying genre stories and marketing them to people who wouldn't be caught dead with Neil Gaiman or China Miéville. The Time Traveller's Wife might also belong in this group, and there's a review in this week's NYT of a book called The Traveller that also sounds right. With the exception of the Clarke (and even in her case, if it weren't for the prose, you would have been better off reading Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist and getting the same story for a third of the page count), these books don't seem to do genre very well, but they're respectable enough to get reviews in the major papers. In fact, I remember when the S&N publicity machine was warming up with that absurd 'Harry Potter for adults' tagline, I made some annoyed noises at Patrick Nielsen-Hayden's website and was told that the marketing strategy was specifically geared to getting people who wouldn't normally read fantasy to pick this book up because it wasn't their idea of what fantasy was.

By: CAAF

CAAF — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:57:25 +0000

Agree with you about Jonathan Strange, even if I did wander off halfway through. It's got great wit, which was lacking in The His. (and that's the last thing I'm saying about The His. as I feel I am whacking on it mercilessly, when it really wasn't so bad. I am trying to diagnose my disappointment. Jimmy, I bet the Regulator will be PACKED. Far better to sit in a quiet restaurant eating a kebab.

By: Jenny D

Jenny D — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:22:38 +0000

I loved JONATHAN STRANGE, it’s actually much more my kind of book than THE HISTORIAN (better prose style) though there are obvious similarities. VALIANT is amazing, I completely second Justine’s comments–loved TITHE, but VALIANT is just superb. And JUST like being a teenager! The NJ transit train scene and the running around NY and behaving badly part of it practically made me have flashbacks to myself at age 17 or 18, it’s a great, great book… Yes, neither Clarke nor Kostova is primarily interested in character…

By: Jimmy Beck

Jimmy Beck — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:06:10 +0000

Mmmm…kebab.

Welcome back, CAAF. You’ve officially relieved me from going to hear Kostova read tonight–I’m grateful. The Regulator sent out two emails exhorting people to come–I guess that’s the $500,000 in marketing scratch in action…

By: CAAF

CAAF — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:00:20 +0000

oh Sarah, so glad to stoke the flames of someone’s eagerness to read The Untelling … let me know what you think when you get to it. I think it deserves many, many more readers.

I do agree with the virtues of the taking-the-time ness of The Historian, but I thought if she was going to take that approach they should have removed the whole “we’re looking for our friend in the tomb” element, which wouldn’t have been hard to do. If they were just trying to work a scholarly puzzle I wouldn’t have gotten so fierce with their meal-taking and wandering the streets of the city they were in.

And I would argue that what those really long, old-fashioned novels offer is an attention to the niceties of character and social relations that was missing here. Kostova’s a fine, intelligent writer: I know she’s capable of noticing these things, so I just hope in her next novel she does.

Gwenda, they may have to start using a bike pump in the warehouses to inflate all the “fantasy books of summer” to their proper size.

By: gwenda

gwenda — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:47:47 +0000

I think the yearly tagline for the big blockbuster fantasy novel should now be: “If you read only one book this summer, make sure it’s a really long one.”

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:43:49 +0000

I do think it helped that I read the bulk of THE HISTORIAN on a train between Ottawa and Toronto, in that I had loads of uninterrupted time. But the reason I knew the book worked for me is that when I wasn’t reading, I got incredibly cranky. I wanted to know what happened, and yeah there were boring parts (that 100 page section in the middle-end? Should have been cut) but I was actually glad that Kostova *didn’t* go for the obvious raising-stakes page turner approach. She took her time and that’s rare nowadays. It was more of an old-fashioned novel in that respect (American Tragedy meets Dracula?)

But I am getting so ridiculously excited to read Tayari Jones it is not even funny. So thanks for stoking that flame further, Carrie!