Hm. Well, yes, possibly stating "I could not finish this book" is reasonable enough.
But that didn't seem to be the case in that particular review. I wish I still had the magazine at hand. But since I had read the book in toto, I found the claim that it was impossible to read dubioius. Like I said, since I had read the whole, I could see what points might not satisfy a Western reader, and wouldn't have minded if they had actually been cited as causes. But that wasn't what Morris did: it was a rather short, curt "This bored me, and I didn't finish it." I got the feeling that she hadn't even begun reading the book until shortly before the review was due. I had been tracking the title's release because I'd seen advance notice of it in Publishers Weekly, so I was on top of the book well before the review came out.
On top of that, we're not talking about some obscure Japanese novel. This was the book that got called "the Japanese Gone With the Wind", a novel that had, by the time the English translation was published (the first such, remember), inspired nine films adapting the whole or parts of it. It was a work that deserved a complete read, whether one liked it or not.
Heh. Yeah. Guess I'm still worked up about it, for this specific instance.
On principle though, I concede the point that "Could not finish this," with an explanation of why, can provide a legitimate review.
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Date: 2011-03-04 07:40 pm (UTC)But that didn't seem to be the case in that particular review. I wish I still had the magazine at hand. But since I had read the book in toto, I found the claim that it was impossible to read dubioius. Like I said, since I had read the whole, I could see what points might not satisfy a Western reader, and wouldn't have minded if they had actually been cited as causes. But that wasn't what Morris did: it was a rather short, curt "This bored me, and I didn't finish it." I got the feeling that she hadn't even begun reading the book until shortly before the review was due. I had been tracking the title's release because I'd seen advance notice of it in Publishers Weekly, so I was on top of the book well before the review came out.
On top of that, we're not talking about some obscure Japanese novel. This was the book that got called "the Japanese Gone With the Wind", a novel that had, by the time the English translation was published (the first such, remember), inspired nine films adapting the whole or parts of it. It was a work that deserved a complete read, whether one liked it or not.
Heh. Yeah. Guess I'm still worked up about it, for this specific instance.
On principle though, I concede the point that "Could not finish this," with an explanation of why, can provide a legitimate review.