MICHIKO KAKUTANI

[Mark Kohut]

I respect, therefore like Ms. Kakutani for her hard-working integrity. She often reads lots of--all-- previous work by a writer she reviews for the first time. She knows her reading lenses---even if we disagree, as with AtD. And others by others.

A strong reader's aesthetic vision often means getting some books wrong--as we all do. 

Dr. Samuel Johnson, great critic/reader on Tristram Shandy: "Nothing odd will last"

Leo Tolstoy to Chekhov: "Your plays are as bad as Shakespeare's".He wasn't joking. He liked Chekhov's stories;p hated Shakespeare.

Turgenev on Anna Karenina: nowhere near War & Peace. 

Clifton Fadiman on The Sound & The Fury: an utter failure

Nabokov on Dr. Zhivago: contrived trash. Nabokov on The Sheltering Sky: 
AWFUL.

Daily NYTimes reviewer of the time on Catch-22 and Lolita: not worth reading, bad, bad and worse. 

henry james  on Dickens: our best superficial novelist who can never be a great one. 

Edmund Wilson on Kafka: I don't get him.

Later,

mark



--- On Tue, 8/4/09, Nushra MohamedKhan <nushramkhan at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Nushra MohamedKhan <nushramkhan at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: MICHIKO KAKUTANI
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2009, 3:22 PM
> So, I actually like her
> reviews.   I like her style. She doesn't
> like
> cartoons, but she got Michael Chabon right, and she got
> Toni Morrison
> right on cartooning, and she praises Wallace, and she got
> Joseph
> O'Neill right, and Louise Erdrich right, and Franzen, and
> Roth, and
> Jeeez, she got Pynchon right too. Sorry folks, but she gets
> to review
> the books because she is qualified and damn good at it.
> Sure, she's a
> tough critic, but that's a good thing. Seriously, if
> Pynchon were to
> listen to her, he's write better novels. AGTD is great, but
> man could
> it be improved if he took out some 300-odd pages and
> squared it up
> took out a couple few stupid plot lines and a 
> couplefew dozen
> chanracters and a dozen or two vague re-runs of old
> material like that
> Lew in the Tarot London stuff.
> 
> Books of the Times
> Looking for a Home in the Limbo of Alaska
> By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
> Published: May 1, 2007
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/books/01kaku.html
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/books/04kaku.html
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/books/16book.html
>