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"Landscape with Animals"


emjays

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Sonya Hartnett's book "Landscape with Animals" was slammed by a senior critic in Oz. Sonya had thought him a friend. A friend? Have just read the book and must agree with the criticism. Does any one have a view of this particular book?

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I don't know if it's out here yet? The only copy of Landscape with Animals I can find on Amazon is by Cameron Redfern.

 

ETA: A search of Wikipedia reveals that Sonya Hartnett also writes as Cameron Redfern! The book has no reviews on Amazon yet.

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Sonya Hartnett's book "Landscape with Animals" was slammed by a senior critic in Oz. Sonya had thought him a friend. A friend? Have just read the book and must agree with the criticism. Does any one have a view of this particular book?

 

Nope!

But I have plenty to say about critics! :lol:

 

It is summed up best by a scene in the wonderful play, Waiting for Godot. The two characters are hurling insults at one another with the final trump being when one calls the other "critic!"

The argument ends in silence.

 

(I love that line!)

 

Here, I found it in the script. I'm overdoing it, I know - but all in the name of Forum Fun.

 

VLADIMIR:
Moron!

ESTRAGON:
That's the idea, let's abuse each other.

They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other.

VLADIMIR:
Moron!

ESTRAGON:
Vermin!

VLADIMIR:
Abortion!

ESTRAGON:
Morpion!

VLADIMIR:
Sewer-rat!

ESTRAGON:
Curate!

VLADIMIR:
Cretin!

ESTRAGON:
(
with finality
)
.
Critic!

VLADIMIR:
Oh!

He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

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Sonya Hartnett's book "Landscape with Animals" was slammed by a senior critic in Oz. Sonya had thought him a friend. A friend? Have just read the book and must agree with the criticism. Does any one have a view of this particular book?

 

If a critic refuses to criticise are particular work because of a friendship, then they're not a very good critic I would have thought. If the author expects nothing but adulation from friends, then it would be best not to make friends with someone whose job it is to publish reviews based on their judgement of the book.

 

There's actually a serious problem in the UK in the newspapers with this sort of "nepotism", where authors who are friends write nice things about each others books.

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I found a (possibly the?) review!

 

Below is just a small part of it:

But not, alas, in this book. Landscape with Animals is the story (if that's the word) of a woman who is a writer, who lives alone and loves animals, and falls overwhelmingly in love and in lust with a presumably "married" (at any rate hitched) man of obscurely artistic profession who hungers for the sea, broods about poets and admirals in the vicinity of a great bridge (in the Great Elsewhere) and is, it appears, the living stallion of the woman's dreams of grace and passion.

 

They come together. My how they come together. In endless lubrication-slick conjugation with every possible appurtenance or object going into every possible orifice and with every kind of pant and grunt the well-oiled imagination can summon up.

 

The reader, if she's not lost in some dream of passion or earnestness, will laugh, like a drain, at the pure monotonous dance of sexual besottedness.

 

It is, in fact, executed with a good deal of dexterity amid the cliches strewn like so many stained clothes, so much juice-streaked underwear. But this is a piece of writing by Sonya Hartnett the way an American Express card ad on television might represent a collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

 

The difference is that it goes for 200 pages rather than two minutes and what is being advertised is rather less straightforward.

:lol: LOL - it ends thus:

 

Sonya Hartnett's second impulse was right. She is too good a writer to put her name to this indigestible hairball of spunk and spite.

 

Full article here - it's on two pages, but is worth reading!

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