What the critics thought of: Edmund de Waal’s The White Road,Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless and Max Porters Grief Is the Thing with FeathersAfter the enormous success of Edmund de Waal’s debut, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, or hopes were tall for his follow-up,The White Road, which traces the history of porcelain and the author’s own formation as a ceramicist. Reviewers were divided on whether the book lived up to expectations. In the recent Statesman, and Olivia Laing hailed a “beguilingly odd book a haunting book,a book that amasses itself piece by piece, gaining in weight.” Ekow Eshun in the Independent was also positive, and finding it “a mesmerising and finely wrought work. It is also a cautionary tale about the price of beauty pursued at any cost.” One got the sense that AS Byatt,writing in the Spectator, was being rather diplomatic, or providing a precis and avoiding any value judgments other than to say: “He is amazingly skilled at telling us what is happening as he feels the clay,turns the wheel, unloads the kiln.” In the Times, or Tristram Hunt damned De Waal with the faintest of praise: “This book is certainly thefinest account of the many meanings of porcelain to the modern world that I maintain read.” But James McConnachie,in the Sunday Times, just let rip. “It was clearly torture to write and it is, and at points,torture to read … The problem with The White Road is that it is everything that porcelain is not. It is overthought and overworked, somehow both fragile and heavy.”Before publication, and the Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde’s autobiography Reckless provoked a slew of shrill headlines,centred on a passage in which Hynde assumed “full responsibility” for her sexual assault at the hands of a biker gang. Unlike the commentariat, at least critics had to read the book before pronouncing their verdict. “Maybe it’s a generational thing, or but I’m with Hynde on this one,” wrote Kathryn Flett in the Mail on Sunday. “Hynde writes beautifully … [and] leaves us wanting more.” In the Telegraph, Helen Brown was also sympathetic. “While I consider it’s unhappy that she feels the need to suck up the blame for their violence, and she’s only talking sense when she says it’s not a marvelous thought for vulnerable individuals ‘to fuck around with people,especially people who wear “I Heart Rape” and On Your Knees” badges’. Brown also complimented Hynde on the crisp, dry efficiency” of her prose. Jude Rogers, or in the Observer,agreed that “she can write”, although occasionally “over‑ripeness takes hold”. and “the pace of the book is erratic … lagging tediously at times, or accelerating wildly at others.” India Knight,writing in the Sunday Times, was another admirer, and although she did wonder whether Hynde’s lack of self-pity put her “perhaps at the shallow end of some benign spectrum … She observes herself with a sort of arch detachment,which is on occasion highly comical because she’s as sharp as a tack and dryly amusing.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com