Booker Short List

[calbert at pop.tiac.net]

Never mind the bookers - here come the unpasteurized milk product 
consumers.

From:
www.salonmagazine.com/books/review/1999/09/22/rufin/index.html

"Comment dirais-je? Ces imbeciles! To
                         translate more gently, what possessed the French to award the
                         Prix Goncourt to this amateurish historical novel? If I were Andre
                         Makine, Patrick Chamoiseau, Michel Tournier or Marguerite
                         Duras, all previous winners, I'd be embarrassed to keep company
                         with Jean-Christophe Rufin. "The Abyssinian" is a first novel that
                         should have been exiled to a remote file cabinet for crimes against
                         style, wit and character development....


"Rufin's idea of a metaphor is to go flailing in its
                         general direction. To describe Alix's budding
                         charms, he tells us "that beauty came over her,
                         the way a rash spreads over a person's face at
                         the onset of fever."


gddm!!!! I thought this stuff only appeared around Bulwer Lytton 
time.

love,
cfa