Bob

Car audio folks DON'T CARE Maggie!
X-posted SPAM
"Margaret Shiels" <margaret_nospamplzshiels@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:2005111301300773557%margaretnospamplzshiels@g mxde...
> Gentle uk.rec.audio.car reader,
>
> First, my apology for cross-posting to this NG. Be assured that this is a
> one-off. It will never happen again.
>
> My sole purpose is to draw your attention to what I believe are dubious
> practices by Amazon.co.uk. I also believe that at stake here is freedom of
> expression.
>
> Amazon have rejected my reader review of a novel by John McGahern. In the
> UK and Ireland it was published under the title, "That They May Face The
> Rising Sun". In the USA and elsewhere it's entitled simply "The Lake".
>
> You may have read it. You may even have thoroughly enjoyed it.
>
> That is not the issue. The issue is that Amazon refuse to publish my
> review. First, they ignored it. When it failed to appear, they fed me the
> excuse of their moderators being too busy to read it. Next they insisted
> (three times) that it did not comply with their review guidelines.
>
> I copied their guidelines to my Amazon correspondent and asked her to
> specify the guidelines with which my review did not comply. She replied
> that she could not be specific.
>
> When I threatened to expose Amazon on the net, they relented, and said
> that my review broke two of their rules. (It did not.) But I amended it,
> and you can read it below. You'll see that, although it's critical, there
> are other reviews on Amazon.co.uk that are far more critical than mine.
>
> So what's going on? Have they done a deal with McGahern's publisher? It
> would not surprise me; the book trade has became increasingly corrupt. Why
> do you think that only a small number of books get reviewed in the
> papers - and that they're the same books in each paper? Because they're
> the best books at that moment? Think again.
>
> Read the actual READER reviews on Amazon and see how they compare with the
> newspaper reviews. You will read lines like: "I bought this book because I
> believed all the hype. I was very disappointed."
>
> We are being conned.
>
> Anyhow, I dutifully submitted the amended review, with the assurance that
> it would appear within 5 days. It did not.
>
> The astute reader will understand that this could continue ad nauseam,
> with Amazon trying to wear me down so much that I would give up and forget
> it.
>
> I won't. Free speech and free expression are at issue here. Amazon now
> control something like 80% of book sales worldwide. They have killed the
> small bookseller. Soon the medium-sized book store will follow, and Amazon
> will have a monopoly.
>
> At that point they can do anything they please. Try posting a very
> critical book review then!
>
> Sincerely, and my apologies again for the cross-posting!
>
> Margaret Shiels
>
> --------------------
>
> [The review Amazon didn't want you to see
>
> When MIGHT is right.
>
> In his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the apostle Paul wrote of
> "those who are being lost, because they didn't receive the love of the
> truth, that they might be saved. (2:10)"
>
> What a shame that John McGahern didn't read his Scripture with a little
> more diligence; had he done so, he might not have botched the grammar in
> the very title of his book, and might instead have called it: "That They
> MIGHT Face the Rising Sun". If the poor English had ended there then all
> might have been well. As it is, when one gets past the title page, it's
> all downhill.
>
> The novel provides clear evidence that, once a writer's book is denounced
> by the Catholic Church, all subsequent work will be praised as literature.
> We need only think of the frightful Edna O'Brien....
>
> And literature is what this book clearly is not, at least not when it's
> read objectively, without the baggage of the encomia that have attached
> themselves to McGahern over the years, like limpets on a whale's buttocks.
>
> It's terrible. I could not get beyond page 36. I tried; I genuinely did.
> The lacklustre prose is indistinguishable from that of Alice Taylor - in
> fact Taylor's outdoes McGahern's quite often. There is a myth, no doubt
> put about by McGahern himself, that he overwrites excessively, then prunes
> remorselessly. If that's the case, then the out-takes of "TTMFTRS" must
> have been excruciatingly bad.
>
> He has no style, plain and simple - indeed I'd have preferred "plain and
> simple" rather than McGahern's weak and often cringe-making attempts at
> style. The English language seems foreign to him. It's English for
> Beginners, the vocabulary of the semi-educated. And one would think, to
> read McGahern, that Peter Mark Roget had never drawn breath. "Sure why use
> synonyms," he must reason, "when the one verb can be made to serve every
> situation?" Everybody "walks" for example; no sauntering, hastening,
> loping, striding or what have you. Clichés proliferate, and inept ones at
> that: a bird drops "like a stone" (the only time I ever saw a bird
> dropping like a stone was when my husband let fall a frozen chicken in the
> supermarket).
>
> All the characters speak with the same, dull, interchangeable voice. Nor
> does the dialogue always ring true; at one point, for example, a country
> person speaks the line, "None of us believes and we go", a usage I've
> never encountered in rural Leitrim.
>
> McGahern cannot write characters that engage me. Because all speak with
> the same voice, it was difficult to choose between them, and as a result,
> no one character held my attention.
>
> His narrative is even worse than his dialogue: "His eyes glittered on the
> pot as he waited, willing them to a boil." Classic Alice Taylor, that. I
> flipped through the pages and chose passages at random. There were no fine
> words or interesting turns of phrase that merited a mention. In fact, all
> I found was mediocre writing, hardly better than anything a schoolchild
> could write. And the syntax! Even that infamous torturer of English syntax
> Anita Desai could do no worse than: "The Shah rolled round the lake with
> the sheepdog in the front seat of the car every Sunday and stayed until he
> was given his tea at six."
>
> The dust jacket quotes the Observer; evidently it hailed McGahern as
> "Ireland's greatest living novelist". Whoever wrote that should hang
> his/her head in shame, and apologize at once to ... well, to everybody
> really; such poor writing as this does Ireland no favours.
>
> If I am wrong, and there truly is a great novel lurking between the covers
> of this book, then why on earth bury it beneath such dreadful prose? I
> honestly tried to allow this novel to grip me, but it failed dismally.
> Should I have persevered simply because it was written by "the finest
> Irish writer now working in prose"? The hell I should! Two out of ten, and
> that's being generous.
>