Have Words–Will Write 'Em

My review of Emmanuel Carrère’s memoir, My Life As A Russian Novel, will be published in The Boston Globe in the next few weeks. It’ll be the first time I’ve reviewed a memoir, and it’s a damn good book.

I’ve done a couple of other reviews for The Globe. My first one was on Martha McPhee’s novel Dear Money. The National Book Critics Circle called that piece an exemplary review and re-posted it on the Powell’s Books website.

My second review was on Justin Kramon’s novel, Finny.

My next piece for The Globe will be a review of Benjamin Percy’s first novel, The Wilding.

by

Joseph Peschel © August, 2010

I hope that I shall never write
A blurb as fluffy and as trite.

A blurb whose hungry mouth expressed
A songfest that oughtta be suppressed

A blurb that praises Grossman all day,
About “walls pulled down” just to say:

“The most gifted writer I’ve ever read.”
And other stuff that fills me with dread:

Upon whose essence she’s been touched;
She intimately goes on too much.

Reviews are made by fools superb,
But only Krauss can gush a blurb.

Here is a link to the Krauss Blurb

and here is the text, should the link go astray:

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.

—Nicole Krauss