    
Jamadagni
Bewarse
Username: Jamadagni
Post Number: 1754
Registered: 03-2004
Posted From: 69.248.82.180
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 05, 2005 - 9:19 pm: |    |
think between incompetence and malice, almost no decent reviewing takes place in India. Mostly it is the clever, collegiate 'quiz competition' kind of notices that pass off for book reviews. Media journeymen -- out of work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers -- these are the ones who are handed out books. Most of them lack the skill, the craft, the heart, the understanding of the tradition, to assess serious books. They lack the ability to inhabit the intent or ambition of a book. They praise bad books, damn good ones -- all without understanding or reason.
At best, some of the more enterprising ones trawl the Internet and acquire some jargon and some familiarity -- the quiz-master kind -- with arcane literary names. And worse, they mostly write for small backslapping coteries -- again the same kind of collegiate sensibility, strongly reflective of half-knowledge mostly acquired through a few books and having nothing to do with adult lived lives.
Unfortunately, literature is neither a college quiz nor a college canteen caucus of precious-clever girls and boys, giggling over their first planned fornication or their last smart quip. Faulkner and Kafka don't live there; nor do Naipaul and Marquez. They move amid lived lives -- its concerns are different from those of quiz books.
However the sweet thing -- and proof of their incompetence -- is the fact that this reviewing makes no difference to the life of a book. Reviewers in India can neither make nor break a book. In the final analysis, the reviewer here is merely another reader, but cursed with the burden of having to make a telling pronouncement. Into all this thrown envy and malice. A very sad potion is what you get.
Of course, it's not to say it's all bad, but mostly it is -- inconsequential. Writers should deal with reviews largely by ignoring them -- both the good and the bad. If a writer has done his work honestly he's already done the best he could -- there is no cause to fret about anything.
http://us.rediff.com/news/2005/may/03inter1.htm |
