shoddy book reviewing, or, reviewing the reviewers

Neena De reviewed my book in The Assam Tribune on 7 December, and Elizabeth Kuruvilla followed suit in the Hindustan Times on 23 December.

While I’d like to thank both newspapers for giving some space to a first-time novelist, I’d like to point out something about the reviews. Both reviews are uncannily similar: they breathlessly describe the story like a schoolchild writing a précis about a book, then make a cursory stab at a big idea (the book is by someone from the north-east, so how could they resist “Alienation”?!), and finally end on a patronising note. De says, “If the author tightens up his style or finds a better editor, his next book will be one to look forward to.” And Kuruvilla says, “Saikia’s novel falters because of his amateurish writing style. If only publishers would realise that they should be in the race to produce the most number of good books, not just the most number of books.”

Pankaj Mishra said somewhere that to review and criticise effectively, you need to have done some good writing of your own too. It’s something I doubt Ms De and Ms Kuruvilla have paid heed to. If you’ve read both reviews, you’ll see that De and Kuruvilla are the ones who need to shape up their prose, what with De’s pedestrian turn of phrase: “He went to Delhi to study. Presumably his parents had high hopes when they sent him there.” and Kuruvilla’s convoluted sentences: “Would he be admitting to failure if, like his college friends, he went back to Shillong, a place where he does not have to try to fit in, to a girl who may not be exciting like Naina, but at least is comforting in her familiarity.”

I think both reviewers opened the book looking for the Big Themes and Universal Significance that Literature is supposed to have: I can almost hear them saying as they went through the book, “Drinking, cooking pork, having sex, no interest in working—what is this? This is not Literature!” I am sorry to have disappointed them.

A review of a novel is meant to be something more than just a recounting of the book’s plot. What has the author set out to do? In what context can you place his work? Matters like these seem beyond my two esteemed reviewers. They also display a curious lack of interest in the real workings of the novel: what did they think of the main characters, the settings in Delhi and Shillong, the way the plot unfolds? I would have thought it worth their while to put in a word about these things.

I hope they take my criticism in the same spirit that I took theirs!

Something that the editor in me spotted: the HT newspaper review has em-dashes used both with spaces and without spaces. Being consistent is a basic editing skill, but maybe it’s something beneath the august notice of reviewer and/or sub-editor in this case.

If she had read the book a bit more carefully, Kuruvilla would have realised that Naina DOES NOT fall “into the arms of an Afghan coke dealer”: on page 121 and page 184, Naina and Karim respectively clear up the narrator’s doubts as to whether the two of them had slept together.

De spends a lot of time analysing why my narrator behaves the way he does: she doesn’t seem to notice that the narrator is himself aware of these things, and that he ends up doing things against his judgement—so there’s nothing new she brings to the book.

Book reviewing is a skilled art. It certainly doesn’t mean reproducing the plot of a novel in about a hundred words and adding a lofty pronouncement at the end. Both De and Kuruvilla have a long way to go before they can call themselves reviewers.