I read quite a lot. I also try to review each
book I read. Sometimes it’s a cursory mention of themes, settings and plot,
just enough just to keep the memory alive. I find it helps, because with the help
of these little clues I often find that some time after finishing a book I suddenly
understand it better after re-reading the review and thereby appreciate more
completely what it was trying to say. If, of course, the book had anything to
say!
Usually, my reviews of 500 to 1000 words,
sometimes longer if I decide to include grab-quotes. I keep the reviews in a
commonplace book that I started in August 1973, immediately after some of the
most interesting years of my life when I was an undergraduate in London. These
years are condemned to remain no more than memories, it seems, but the memories
remain strong.
My reviews are rarely judgmental. I am not keen
on star ratings, though some places where I share my reviews demand them. It
seems to me the height of self-delusion to use a single, five-value scale to quantify
eternal opinion on work that might be as diverse as a haiku or Ulysses. Equally
facetious is the banal “I liked it” which, like all clichés, should be avoided
like the plague.
What I try to do, sometimes, is to mimic the
style of the book. This means that reviews of nineteenth century fiction are
longer than those for books from the 20th century. The draft of a recent review
of Middlemarch had so many subordinate clauses, asides and God‘s-eye-view
observations that the first sentence reached 200 words. I remember it made the
point I intended, but I ditched it.
So, with the decades of summary reviewing behind
me, one would have thought that completing an author interview would be a
trivial exercise. But no. I was just ten questions into the process when I
realized I had spent over an hour at the task, and I had written very little
indeed. The process suddenly took on an importance I had not envisaged
developing when I started.
In the final analysis, the book that formed the
basis of the interview, Eileen McHugh, a life remade, must speak for itself.
The review is merely an aide memoire. The book must speak for itself. It will
have to, because trying to express where it came from was a disturbingly cathartic
experience which probably only skirted clarity. The interview is online at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/philipspires.
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