Blurb-a-liscious
What’s the most over-the-top book blurb you’ve ever read?
The UK’s Guardian has their nominee, one that they call, in a bit of understatement, “strikingly effusive.”
It comes from Nicole Krauss (recently named one of the 20 best writers under 40 by the New Yorker, she is the author of The History of Love and the forthcoming Great House) for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land,
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.
The last line prompted critic Scott Esposito to write on his blog, Conversational Reading, that he thinks he can live without having the place of his own essence touched.
The Guardian is running a contest for readers to create an outrageous blurb, for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. They chose that title because, “…we don’t want to make it easy for you by letting you blurb a book which may actually be good, like Grossman’s. ”
No winner of the outrageous blurb award has been announced yet. Our vote goes to the following, which manages to match the tone of Krauss’s blurb, in far fewer words,
I was so enamoured, beguiled and enraptured at the thought of reading the The Da Vinci Code, I decided not to. Therefore, I also urge you not to, lest the spell is broken.
Meanwhile, The Guardian says that, apart from the blurb, David Grossman’s book sounds “extremely interesting. The story of an Israeli mother, Ora, who sets out for a hike in Galilee with her former lover in order to avoid the ‘notifiers’ who might tell her of her son’s death in the army…”
The book will be published here in September. There are no prepub reviews so far.
|
