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The Misblurbed Fight Back
May 1, 2007
Was very pleased to see the piece on "misblurbing" at the end of the NYTBR on Sunday.
It was a little uncanny, though. A few days before, a finished copy of Paulo Coelho's The Witch of Portobello had arrived. Stuffed into the book was a press-pak that has the following, from PW's review, as its boldface lede:
"Multimillion-seller Coelho...returns with another uncanny fusion of philosophy, religious miracle, and moral parable...spectacular."
I remembered the review. It did not call the book "spectacular."
We know that publishers spin hay into gold, and we are grateful to them for doing it. So just as an exercise--an exercise in joking, I'm-not-serious, tension-releasing, playful fun--let's try a little reverse-osmosis. Below, let's take the PW review of The Witch of Portobello, break it down sentence-by-sentence, and give it a spin as negative as the misblurb is positive.
Review in blue, reverse-expanded-misblurb in red.
"Multimillion-seller Coelho (The Devil and Miss Prym, etc.) returns with another uncanny fusion of philosophy, religious miracle and moral parable." "Uncanny" is not a positive thing. Here its use seems to try to capture the How of the Coelho phenomenon -- that he somehow taps into not-necessarily-related pieces of the zeitgeist (a need for rationalization, a desire for actual miracle, a hunger for moral structure) and ties them together higgledy-piggledy, like Huey Long did in his "Every Man a King" speech.
"The Portobello of the title is London's Portobello Road, where Sherine Khalil, aka Athena, finds the worship meeting she's leading—where she becomes an omniscient goddess named Hagia Sophia—disrupted by a Protestant protest." Makes me think of a flourishy lady presiding over mushrooms in an Italian Church on a grey London day--quite the infelicitous mishmash. 
Also thought of St. Eustace tripping out. Subtle pro-drug message?
"Framed as a set of interviews conducted with those who knew Athena, who is dead as the book opens, the story recounts her birth in Transylvania to a Gypsy mother, her adoption by wealthy Lebanese Christians; her short, early marriage to a man she meets at a London college (one of the interviewees); her son Viorel's birth; and her stint selling real estate in Dubai." This reminded me of an aspect of The Devil and Miss Prym (Coelho's previous book) that I found distasteful. The Mephistopheles-like figure of The Devil... is an Arab whose character draws on stock stereotypes and tempts a rugged European town, and its one good-hearted maiden, to ruin. As a scorekeeper with that history in mind when reading the blue above, I am disappointed by Athena's origins. Why not just make her Arab-born? And when he does give her Arab parents, he makes them Christian. While we love Christian Arabs as much as we love everyone else (including our cousin Sadie), it feels like an attempt to make Athena safer. (I suppose, though, if the parents were not Christian, it leaves the book open to a "corrupting influence" reading of Athena's straying from Christianity. I ended up reading the whole book, scorekeeping incessantly. There is an appealing Bedouin character.)
"Back in London in the book's second half, Athena learns to harness the powers that have been present but 
inchoate within her, and the story picks up as she acquires a 'teacher' (Deidre O'Neill, aka Edda, another interviewee), then disciples (also interviewed), and speeds toward a spectacular end." Spectacular: attention grabbing, showy, all-lights-and-no-beef, shock and awe.
"Coelho veers between his signature criticism of modern life and the hydra-headed alternative that Athena taps into. Athena's earliest years don't end up having much plot, but the second half's intrigue sustains the book." "Veers" is a give-away verb for a badly-structured book. The criticism of modern life was and is a cornerstone of Fascism. "Hydra-headed" is not attractive or coherent. "Not much plot" means padded and boring. "Sustains" does not mean spectacular. It means you can get through it.
That really was fun. Spectacular.
Posted by Michael Scharf on May 1, 2007 | Comments (0)
