Sometimes I wonder if people in the book trade actually, you know, read?
I have, my dearios, lately been apprized of a forthcoming work the advance notice for which suggests that the authors of whom the reader will detect 'echoes' are Thomas Mann and Flann O'Brien* (Penguin books tout him as 'Ireland's greatest comic writer', which one must concede must be a hotly fought-over crown).
Quite apart from that being an oddly assorted match (though I will cop to having, very much back in the day, found Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man unexpectedly amusing) -
- the work in question is an m/m romance set in particularly parlous times.
I will not expatiate on the premise of the romance which is horrible in the extreme. It should go to Venice, go straight to the nearest canal, and plunge in without waiting for the cholera epidemic to supervene.
But really, this seems a pitch that is quite surreally all over the place and suggests a random grasp at some degree of litcred by invoking novelists of the nationality of the characters in question (we add that there is significant crassness in the choice) - in order to signal that this is not just soppy ro-mance or smut. It is writ by a bloke, which of course does not entirely rule out the preceding, but often signals that ponceyness is forthcoming and litrachur is in the offing.
It makes one wonder whether people in The Trade of Producing and Publicising Books are required to know anything about them?
I lately came across a Twitter thread - admittedly it was doing the Tweeting equivalent of throwing up hands in horror, gasping and stretching of eyes - about people who set out to write books but Do Not Read Books. The kindest explanation that was given was that, if you want to do A Creative Thing, the startup requirements for writing are fairly low-investment, and Eny Fule No how to put words on paper/screen.
But possibly people also want to work in a bookish ambience but not actually read the things???
*Many years ago I saw a novel which was blurbed as 'In the tradition of Flann O'Brien, Edna O'Brien, and [some other Irish writer of great distinction, possibly Beckett, maybe Joyce. Not, I think, dear Oscar or Somerville&Ross]' and my immediate thought was 'that is a dog's breakfast'
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