Jonathan Lethem did not like James Wood's review

[Mark Kohut]

thanks for the shout-out Kai. 
 
Another Wood-en splinter: a couple summers ago I read War & Peace for the first time. (Yes, very worth it as if you needed me to say this). I had one personal copy---the vaunted Maude Inner Sanctum edition---but I also read parts in other translations (Library check-outs mostly), including the overhyped darlings Peaver and Volkhonsky's newest translation and compared. Wanted to learn. always a pupil. 
 
Wood had praised this translation like a publicist for it. What anyone of reading maturity--and many eager young trying to get there---could IMMEDIATELY see is that major parts of the battle scenes, dialogue, soldierness was SO BAD one had to feel affronted. (I later learned that the female 
of the translating team is the one who knews Russian from birth and she did the first Englishing and then they together made it as perfect as they could. I say they DID NOT do that to major parts of the war parts....("the parts everyone skips anyway:, one person told me) 
 
It was then I knew Wood had not read nor reread completely the new translation he was publishing. And, if he sampled as one might give him a break on, he did a poor job......(Even I knew of the audience readership divide).....

From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com>
Cc: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 8, 2011 6:23 AM
Subject: Re: Jonathan Lethem did not like James Wood's review


Just read "How Fiction Works" and wonder what the fuss is about. The guy is not only an arrogant prick (just look at how he's writing about fictional characters from lower classes!), he also doesn't have a real point. And the book with its 123 chapters on 211 pages (German edition), its plentifulness of rhetorical questions and exclamations reads actually more like food journalism or something. I hope that Pynchon, unlike Lethem, did not give Wood the honor of answering him personally. (But I understand now better, why Mark wrote his furious letter). If this is "the world's most influential critic", this world is culturally dead. I still prefer to think that people like Harold Bloom or Marcel Reich-Ranicki hold that position. Oh, and since Wood is trying to diss Bloom, let me finally say that everybody who's looking for something like "How Fiction Works" makes a better choice by taking "How to Read and Why".  And not only because Bloom praises CoL49 to
 the skies.


On 07.11.2011 19:48, Robert Mahnke wrote:

> http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/12467824780/my-disappointment-critic
> 
>