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| Hearsay: |
The reckless art of book blurbing profiled at the CBC. (Warning: large Eggers photo embedded)
Take this example from the paperback cover of British author Nicola Barker’s last novel, Clear. According to the London Spectator, “The brilliance of Barker’s style is beyond perfection.” Now, I haven’t read Clear, but I’d venture to say that at best, it’s perfection. “Beyond perfection” is like that old sports adage about “giving 110 per cent”: it’s patently illogical. Like so many critics nowadays, it seems the person who reviewed Clear was so euphoric, they momentarily lost their mind.
I myself have never had a (non-review excerpt) blurb on the back of a book and have never given one. I’ve always thought them ridiculous and somehow very sad. It’s a choice I’ve been revisiting as of late, but I can’t see any reason to change right yet. Maybe it’ll be different if I ever publish prose. I think we should hold a contest — whoever can come up with the most ridiculous REAL blurb (ie, pulled from the back of an extant book) will win a bunch of free books. Append your blurbs and comments to this post and after a few days, if we get enough, we’ll pick a winner.
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May 3rd, 2006 at 10:23 am
On the back cover of Signal Fires by Christopher Dewdney: “[His] poems have a painful, visceral quality to them that rasps against the cerebral and genteel aspects of their presentation. They are about the redemption of human misery magnified to the highest power.”-eye Weekly
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:51 am
I love love LOVE blurbs! I love them for what they are.
May 3rd, 2006 at 12:36 pm
On the back of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye:
“A brilliant, three-dimensional mosaic … the story of Elaine’s childhood is so real and heartbreaking you want to stand up in your seat and cheer.” — The Boston Sunday Globe
What can I say? The emotional (not to mention geometrical) gymnastics of that are, well, so real and heartbreaking you want to stand up in your seat and cheer.
(John Vardon of the New Quarterly once proposed a verb-form, incidentally: to blurble.)
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:15 pm
“As we get on with ‘the non-blue business of the day,’ Florence Treadwell’s book arrives like a blue sweater filling the doorway and nothing is the same again. Her poems are sensual, the words caressed, yet they are tough and clear-eyed in their difficult, passionate negotiation with love, grief and memory.” –Lorna Crozier
This isn’t remarkable for the sheer number of cliches it contains–8 by my count–which is to be expected in a blurb, but what the fuck is up with the blue sweater?! Alex Good found it a bad enough blurb to include in his 2003 edition of The Puffies, the original bad blurb award.
May 4th, 2006 at 10:13 am
Okay, I might just have a winner here. From the back cover of Ray Hsu’s _Anthropy_, courtesy of George Elliott Clarke:
“Ray Hsu? A voice rye-wry, an eye light-light, a sprightly spiritual image-wright, a poet neo-intellectual, post-modernist, avant garde classical. His words are not to peruse, but pursue, via lyrics part-jazz, part-ju-jitsu.”
Whew!
May 4th, 2006 at 10:22 am
Oh, c’mon Z! At least that’s George being George. The Crozier, while certainly Crozier being Crozier could have been written by the Sally Ann reserve book club awards.
May 4th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Sure, and it’s very fresh compared with the usual cover copy praising generous luminosity for which we should be eternally grateful–but it’s still showy nonsense, much like the Eggers blurbs, telling us more about blurber than blurbee. It’s hard to tell if George is taking the piss out of the whole blurbing phenomenon here, or if he really thinks this is a fitting tribute to the poetry of Mr. Hsu.
Do you really think the Sally Ann reserve book club jury could’ve come up with that world-altering blue sweater? That’s a special kind of anti-genius, there…