Tag Archives: fiction/literature

(It’s worth noting here that this novel, Zuleika Dobson, a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford, is included in Modern Library’s List of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century in the English Language (it’s number 59). At the time of the list’s publication, I recall many critics remarking that for this type of academic satire, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis or The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy would have been better choices.

“I do not think it would interest us. The author is more highly esteemed by himself than by anyone else, and has never reached any high standard in his literary work.”

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett I: Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women

“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole. Beckett’s probably a clever fellow, but here he has elaborated a slavish and rather incoherent imitation of Joyce, most eccentric in language and full of disgustingly affected passages—also indecent: the book is damned—and you wouldn’t sell the book even on its title.”

Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett II: Molloy and Malone Dies

“I couldn’t read either book—that is, my eye refused to sit on the page and absorb meanings, or whatever substitutes for meaning in this kind of thing…. This doesn’t make sense and it isn’t funny…. I suspect that the real fault in these novels, if I cared to read them carefully, would be simply dullness. There’s no sense considering them for publication here; the bad taste of the American public does not yet coincide with the bad taste of the French avant-garde.”

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“Its effect is to make sympathy, then to put sympathy to sleep, then to exacerbate the nerves of the reader, until, having decided he has as much as he wants to stomach, he throws the book away.”

Times Literary Supplement

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“The style is unattractive if apt, being the oblique and stilted flow of a man working his way around to asking for a loan. There is a good deal of jaded Bohemian rot about the bourgeoisie being worse than professional criminals (are we not all guilty, etc.) and outbursts of cynical anguish about platitudes. e.g. ‘don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them.’ One might define stupidity as the state of needing to be told this.”

Anthony Quinton, New Statesman

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naive, his statement of facts so biased, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly.”

The Bookman

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“As a humorist, Mr. Lewis makes valiant attempts to be funny; he merely succeeds in being silly. In fact, it is as yellow a novel as novel can be.”

Boston Evening Transcript

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.