“These slight, intimate novels created a stir…attracting readers who appreciated their meshing of Barthesian inquiry with the muffled malaise of daily life in post-Pinochet Chile. Their chronicles…set the stage for intensely affecting examinations of the mechanics of fiction.”
The above is part of a review in the New York Times for the recently released novel My Documents by Alejandro Zambra. Perhaps it is just me, but this reminds me of the reviews I’ve been reading recently about modern art, wine, and cheese.
For an abstract chunk of concrete buried in sand: “A controlled naturalism characterizes the new sculpture, the arrangement of detached materials arouse new visual frictions. The comparisons explore divergent notions, reconstitute our relationship to the commonplace, and effectively explore notions of expectation, observation, fantasy, and illusion.”
For a ridiculously expensive red wine: “An incredibly sexy nose of smoke, black fruits, cappuccino, and toasty wood is followed by an expansive, terrifically concentrated wine with a sumptuous texture, no hard edges, beautifully integrated acidity and tannin, and a long, 35 second finish.” (the bottle should have come with an RX for Viagra)
And for a wedge of Calcagno cheese: “Big and floral in the very best way possible, this firm Sardinian sheep has the cool unaffected strut of Mick in his prime, Lou in middle age or Polly Jean today.”
It always leaves me with the feeling that neither the book, art, wine, nor cheese was actually good, or understood, but the job required the reviewer to say something artsy and intelligent.