The Poe Shadow
Worn out by another night of staring at the new shiny box, I stayed home today and finished The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. He wrote The Dante Club which was a rollicking murder mystery with real bearded men of letters trying to stop fictional murders. This was about a fictional young lawyer trying to find out what happened when the (real life) Edgar Allen Poe died mysteriously. He tries to find the model of Poe's fictional detectives to help solve the puzzle and he risks his considerable fortune and his position in society in this quest.
I didn't like it as much as the first book, at least partly because Pearl embraces the gothic horror of Poe's stories which I don't know that well and didn't like that much. But there's some good fun in trying to work out who's telling the truth and whether it matters in the end. There's also a lot of research into the real mystery behind the novel which the historical sources note at the end explains quite well.
But I like it a lot less after visiting Pearl's official website. I know these are vanity exercises designed to sell books (why else would the cover have an endorsement by Dan Brown?) but this is just a dumb thing to say:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution groups Pearl with Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers as adding to "the growing genre of novel being written nowadays -- the learned, challenging kind that does not condescend."
If there's anythhing these three writers have in common it'd be that they're American and their books are long. That's not necessarily a bad thing: I love Jonathon Franzen's complicated skewerings of society but the the one Powers book I've read was at least three times as long as it needed to be and incredibly pretentious.
All right, that's a massive overreaction to a tiny thing. But some days I'm surprised Greenpeace hasn't started campaigning for a UN declaration for saving trees by shortening books. The French would of course be the first to ratify but the Americans would probably see it as a threat to their way of life.
I didn't like it as much as the first book, at least partly because Pearl embraces the gothic horror of Poe's stories which I don't know that well and didn't like that much. But there's some good fun in trying to work out who's telling the truth and whether it matters in the end. There's also a lot of research into the real mystery behind the novel which the historical sources note at the end explains quite well.
But I like it a lot less after visiting Pearl's official website. I know these are vanity exercises designed to sell books (why else would the cover have an endorsement by Dan Brown?) but this is just a dumb thing to say:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution groups Pearl with Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers as adding to "the growing genre of novel being written nowadays -- the learned, challenging kind that does not condescend."
If there's anythhing these three writers have in common it'd be that they're American and their books are long. That's not necessarily a bad thing: I love Jonathon Franzen's complicated skewerings of society but the the one Powers book I've read was at least three times as long as it needed to be and incredibly pretentious.
All right, that's a massive overreaction to a tiny thing. But some days I'm surprised Greenpeace hasn't started campaigning for a UN declaration for saving trees by shortening books. The French would of course be the first to ratify but the Americans would probably see it as a threat to their way of life.
Labels: historical fiction, odd reviews
posted by Mary Bennet | 4:48 pm
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