Search Results for: Review

How Anthony Lane Wrote a Book Review Disguised as a Movie Review

Madame Bovary. Image via Wikimedia Commons

So how does the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, stack up against the book? And what’s in it for non-Jamesians? Well, we lose Ana’s introduction to fellatio, set precariously in a bathtub; in a similar vein, we skip the breakfast that she shares with Christian at an International House of Pancakes. Above all, we are denied James’s personifications, which are so much livelier than her characters: “My sleepy subconscious has a final swipe at me.” “YES! My inner goddess is thrilled.” “NO! my psyche screams.” Couldn’t someone have got Sarah Silverman to play the psyche?

On the other hand, the film, by dint of its simple competence—being largely well acted, not too long, and sombrely photographed, by Seamus McGarvey—has to be better than the novel. It could hardly be worse. No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth. There are poignant moments when the plainest of physical actions is left dangling beyond the reach of her prose: “I slice another piece of venison, holding it against my mouth.” The global appeal of the novel has led some fans to hallow it as a classic, but, with all due respect, it is not to be confused with “Madame Bovary.” Rather, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is the kind of book that Madame Bovary would read. Yet we should not begrudge E. L. James her triumph, for she has, in her lumbering fashion, tapped into a truth that often eludes more elegant writers—that eternal disappointment, deep in the human heart, at the failure of our loved ones to acquire their own helipad.

-From New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane’s movie review of 50 Shades of Grey.

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Review: ‘Working on My Novel’

Longreads Pick

Review of a Twitter joke turned book—which reveals the worst about class and creativity: “The premise is closer to ‘What if a lower- or middle-class person wanted to write a novel?'”

Source: Bookforum
Published: Nov 15, 2014
Length: 6 minutes (1,550 words)

Roxane Gay Reviews The Beach

I have known beaches, but I have no particular fondness for them. I don’t like sand in my crevices. I don’t like sand at all. I don’t enjoy all that sunshine and heat without the benefit of climate control. I don’t enjoy other people at the beach — sticky children, young people with firm bodies and scanty bathing suits, those of less firm body staring forlornly at this spectacle. People bring pets, and I am not an animal person. No, I do not want to pet your dog.

After 10 minutes, I find myself bored. What are we supposed to do at the beach? I’m black, and so I understand sunbathing as a concept but less so as an activity. How long am I supposed to lie in the sun? When do I turn myself over like roasting meat on a spit? How often do I apply this sunscreen you speak of?

Roxane Gay, in The New York Times.

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Photo: notarim, Flickr

The Los Angeles Review of Cups

Longreads Pick

Maria Bustillos reviews Chipotle’s new literary series, curated by Jonathan Safran Foer:

Jonathan Safran Foer’s new Cultivating Thought: Author Series at Chipotle has a slightly uncomfortable name. It suggests that we Chipotle patrons had just kind of been sitting here, mowing down our lunches, blankly existing, uncultivated, thought-less, until Foer came along with his “brainchild”: to provide us all with short works from famous writers printed right on our soda cups and burrito bags. But so many literary lions participated that I was instantly wild to read Chipotle’s whole catalog. I have now done so, and will review each publication below.

Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 6 minutes (1,672 words)

The Decline of Book Reviewing

Longreads Pick

Hardwick’s classic 1959 essay on the dismal state of book criticism. (Robert Silvers has pointed it out as an early inspiration for founding the New York Review of Books.)

For the world of books, for readers and writers, the torpor of the New York Times Book Review is more affecting. There come to mind all those high-school English teachers, those faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe in the judgment of the Times and who need its direction. The worst result of its decline is that it acts as a sort of hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally. The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity — the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself — have made the New York Times into a provincial literary journal, longer and thicker, but not much different in the end from all those small-town Sunday “Book Pages.”

Published: Oct 18, 1959
Length: 14 minutes (3,566 words)