Blurbs: the good, the bad and the truly weird

 

There is a new book out called Blurb Your Enthusiasm, by Louise Willder, who writes blurbs for a living. It is a very entertaining book, looking at all aspects of this skill, full of examples – the good  the bad and the hilarious. She also explains that the word means something slightly different in the US and the UK.

I do recommend the book to all book-lovers (you know who you are) and it would make a great present for another bibliophile.

Blurbs are something I feel very strongly about: it is obvious that Louise takes her job very seriously, and she sounds good at it, and I kind of wish she wrote all the blurbs, because in my view there are a lot of really bad ones out there.

Her book has inspired me to make my own list of featured blurbs and cover copy.

 

1)     Muriel Spark, The Public Image.  

My comment in the blogpost was ‘do not read the Penguin blurb before reading the book - as well as being idiotic, it has a major spoiler’. The blurb writer’s take on one of the characters is awe-inspiringly judgemental, and while I would never presume to know what Spark was thinking, I do not think the blurb writer (whom you would be 99% certain was male) was correct in his thoughts.

2)    And then there is The Driver’s Seat by the same author. This is from the back of a Penguin Modern Classic edition:

Lise leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing, garishly-dressed temptress and flies abroad on the holiday of a lifetime. But her search for adventure, sex and new experiences takes on a far darker significance…

If you have ever read it you will be baffled by this. The combination of the language of chicklit and romantic thriller is not, believe me, a fair description of the plot. Is it possible the writer had not read the book?

3)  I laid into a blurb for Kingsley Amis's The Folks That Live on The Hill  at length, despite enjoying the book:

 

The covers of modern editions  of  feature a very strange description of the book:

Harry Caldecote is the most charming man you'll ever meet, a convivial academic who devotes his life to others. He is on call when his alcoholic niece falls into strange hands, when his brother threatens to emulate Wordsworth, when his son's lesbian lodger is beaten up by her girlfriend. He endures misplaced seductions, swindles and aggressive dogs just to keep the peace at the King's pub in Shepherd's Hill.

(the next line is a pointless spoiler).

This is one of the worst descriptions of the book that I could imagine. The first line is complete rubbish: he is not charming to the reader (the only person in the book who considers him charming is the out-and-out vile Desiree, who is in the next line going to say he is completely ruthless). He is casually kind, but most certainly does not devote his life to others. He is not an academic.

Two of the three events in the next line are misdescribed, and by no stretch of the imagination is Harry ‘on call’. The third sentence is again complete rubbish. The paragraph would lead you to expect a quite different type of book.

4)    Mary Fitt – author bio on Three Sisters Flew Home. The most pretentious one I have ever read (against considerable opposition)

‘It was the vast and pleasant study of mankind that set my feet on the roads he had travelled and sent me to the places where he has resided…. And as Man is the measure of all things I have [studied] his philosophy, his poetry, the works of his hands – and his villainy.’

5)     Possibly my all-time favourite – it is cover copy, a quoted review, rather than a blurb writer’s version. The book is Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, and someone wrote this, and someone else decided it would be great to have on the cover:

Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops.

 

This is the surrounding paragraph from the review, and you can read the rest of my mystified blogpost (which does contain the words ‘pretentious jackass’) here. The book seems pretty much irrelevant.

 

The thriller is borrowing the props of the conventional “literary” novel…
No wonder a newspaper reviewer breathlessly declared that “the vitality of the modern thriller flows directly from the bloody realities of our embattled day”. Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops. The real question is not whether the new thrillers are literature (the answer is no) but whether they really do tell anything about the latest symptom of fiction’s increasing inability to get to the terrifying matters of our time.

 

 

6)    Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier  I re-read my ancient copy of Rebecca, (and  blogged on it) ] and: is this the most terrible blurb or what? I am amusing myself by imagining the blurb culprit: Oxbridge EngLit grad, entry level in publishing, so male... ... he can't believe he has to do this, he who got a starred first and knew FR Leavis, but he will show us how clever he is. (I feel I know him)

 

Those are my worst blurbs – I feel my lovely readers will have more to add in the comments…  Bring them on.