Next week, Colm Toibin will be appearing with Nathan Englander at the Wayward Sons session at the Virginia Festival of the Book. You can get a preview of Toibin’s style in this NYT review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. Toibin considers Human Smoke more worthy of a respectful reading than did NYT reviewer William Grimes, who found it a “self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book.”
More on Toibin here.
Blogging for the Festival, Wistar tackles Nathan Englander, and the Beiderbecke Affair weighs in on Toibin.
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Filed under: VABook08, authors, blogging, books, charlottesville, reading, virginia | Tagged: Beiderbecke Affair, Colm Toibin, Human Smoke, Nathan Englander, Nicholson Baker, OneStarWatt, VABook08, Virginia Festival of the Book
I thought Toibin was an interesting, even odd choice to review Baker’s book — although no more odd than it was for Baker to choose to write it in the first place. I would have expected the NYTBR to hand “Human Smoke” to a historian like John Keegan. Instead, they give it to Toibin, who has no choice but to approach “Human Smoke” as one would any piece of literature.
Unreasonable, I know, but I would have loved two reviews: one by Keegan and one by Toibin. Absent that, I may be forced to read the thing myself!