Human Smoke reviewed by Colm Toibin
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!