Scholarly Reviews

The really sad news is that people don’t, won’t or can’t read. I’m looking at the reviews of Crematorio, an award-winning, critically acclaimed novel by the ultra-talented Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes. And as you can imagine, I’m not going to Amazon or GoodReads to find these reviews. I’m talking specifically about reviews by professional scholars of literature that have appeared in scholarly journals.

Chirbes is not a very easy writer to read but he’s not all that hard either. He has this very distinctive narrative format where a novel is subdivided into sections, and every section is told from the perspective of a different character. With this kind of writing, a reader has to pay attention and analyze, obviously. But one would think that literary critics know how to do that.

What I’m discovering, however, is very disturbing. One reviewer states that Mónica is the mother of Silvia. This critic is undaunted by Mónica being at least 20 years Silvia’s junior. And mind you, these are not some minor characters. It is crucially important that Silvia’s 73-year-old father married a 20-year-old Mónica, making Silvia very resentful. There is a very long section where Silvia discusses the death of her mother and the feelings of betrayal when her supposedly grieving father picked up the cheap and vulgar Mónica.

Another critic keeps listing the characters whose perspective we see in each section but stubbornly misses one of them. That wouldn’t be so shocking (I mean, there’s half a dozen characters, who can be expected to keep track of all of them? Surely not a scholar of literature who has more important things to do) if the character this critic studiously avoids mentioning were not. . . a literary critic. You’d think that this would make the character memorable to literary critics, but there’s no such luck.

The character who is the worst off is Yuri, a Russian bandit. Not a single scholar whose review I have read so far has been able to retain his name. Even though that name is repeated on every page, it just doesn’t stick with the readers who keep confusing Yuri with other characters.

I understand that reviews don’t “count” as products of research and have no influence on tenure or promotion. But if one is signing one’s name to a piece, even a short inconsequential piece, doesn’t it sound like a good idea to avoid sounding like an idiot?