By Steve Rhodes
August 11 – 12.
Publication: New York Times
Cover: A bunch of very tall, thin Harry Potters. For “The Boy Who Lived,” Christopher Hitchens’ review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Yes, that Christopher Hitchens
And that’s the only reason why I read this. True, Hitchens has gone ’round the bend. But he’s still a formidable intellectual force and, besides, you really wouldn’t want to know his take on Potter?
Suffice to say, Hitchens’ opening references Hitler, Stalin and Orwell – probably the only Potter review in the world to do so. So it looks like this might be fun.
Hitchens is most immediately puzzled by the genre of English boarding school literature. “I would give a lot to understand this phenomenon better,” he writes. “Part of it must have to do with the extreme banality and conformity of school life as it is experienced today, with everything oriented toward safety on the one hand and correctness on the other. But this on its own would not explain my youngest daughter a few years ago, sitting for hours on end with her tiny elbow flattening the pages of a fat book, and occasionally laughing out loud at the appearance of Scabbers the rat.”
I guess the popularity of Potter among the kids of writers demands attention. It threatens to send Hitchens’ review into the ordinary, but he recovers quickly. Consider:
“The repeated tactic of deus ex machina (without a deus) has a deplorable effect on both the plot and the dialogue,” Hitchens writes. “The need for Rowling to play catch-up with her many convolutions infects her characters as well. Here is Harry trying to straighten things out with a servile house-elf:
“‘I don’t understand you, Kreacher,’ he said finally. ‘Voldemort tried to kill ou. Regulus died to bring Voldemort down, but you were still happy to betray Sirius to Voldemort? You were happy to go to Narcissa and Bellatrix, and pass information to Voldemort through them . . . ‘
“Yes, well, one sees why he is confused.”
Yet Hitchens isn’t entirely disapproving. While he says that “I honestly think and sincerely hope that [a sequel] will not occur,” he concedes that decades from now, “there will still be millions of adults who recall their initiation into literature as a little touch of Harry in the night.”
Other News & Reviews of Note: In his delighful “Inside the List” column, Dwight Garner recalls a time when the capsule descriptions that ran in Times’s best-seller list were far from the sterile entries of today.
www.nytimes.com
From the Aug.13, 1972 Fiction list:
1. The Exorcist. Blatty. Somewhat crude occult exploitationer about a little girl who is possessed by a devil.
5. The Godfather. Puzo. A kind of bloody fairy tale about the Mafia which leaves the stage littered with rubouts.
From the General list:
4. The Happy Hooker. Hollander. A former prostitute tells all: liberally dosed with sex fantasies for the retarded.
Today we would call that adding value. Back then, it was just called journalism.
*
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: Amerigo Vespucci (founder of America) standing in a toilet (not invented by Thomas Crapper. For a review of The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong.
I wasn’t convinced by this write-up that the book delivers.
*
Publication: Tribune
Note: Why does the Trib even publish a book review anymore? If their aim is to phase it out, just kill it outright now and get it over with. What a total waste.
*
CHARTS
1. Navy Seal
2. Tony Dungy
3. God (A Not-Great One)
Diana is 7th; Gore is 8th; Novak is 10th; Einstein is 11th.
Posted on August 13, 2007