Curtis Sittenfeld, whose new novel is an update of Pride and Prejudice, has annoyed writers by criticising the quality of romance writing. But is she right?
Isabel Allende more than annoyed crime fiction writers a couple of years ago when, after writing her first mystery Ripper, she said that “I’m not a fan of mysteries” because they are “too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there’s no redemption there”. Instead, Allende said, she decided to “take the genre, write a mystery that is faithful to the formula and to what the readers expect, but it is a joke”.
Last year, Kazuo Ishiguro provoked the ire of the fantasy community after wondering how his readers would take his latest novel, The Buried Giant. “Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?” he asked. This question prompted Ursula Le Guin to say that “it appears that the author takes the word for an insult”, and that “no writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre – far less its profound capacities – for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it”. (Ishiguro later clarified: “I am on the side of ogres and pixies”; Le Guin said she’d made an “evidently over-hasty response” to his comment.)
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment