I can imagine! I thought of you when i read the interview...by the time I found Ursula le Guin's acid rebuke the book was already in my kindle, and I approached it with some skepticism.
It took long to take off, but it is solid once you overcome the style.
But it irritates me that fantasy or sci-fi can't be taken seriously unless a "literary" author like Ishiguro or MArgaret Atwood in the case of sci fi deign to go down into it.
In addition to the snobbery, one thing that can happen when you're not familiar with a genre is that you think you're being original when you're not. I read NEVER LET ME GO, and the "twist" (or truth) is one any SF reader would have seen coming a mile away.
I think I liked this book because it echoed some of the things that interest me, and did it in a manner that is not banal. For instance, there's a moment when the elderly couple is rushed trough a tunnel to escape an ambush. Sir Gawain is leading the way, and at a certain point the old ones panic because they think they're walking over skeletons. Sir Gawain, who still has his memories of the terrible massacres of Saxons committed by their side tried to distract them but in the end he says "Our whole country is this way. A fine green valley. A pleasant copse. Dig its soil, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead. (..) beneath our soil lie the remains of old slaughter." That was a powerful thought for me, but there are a few "crappy" sentences in there as well.
Good writing is good writing, be it a piece of accounting or a literary work. But frowning upon fantasy is just so 1970!
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It took long to take off, but it is solid once you overcome the style.
But it irritates me that fantasy or sci-fi can't be taken seriously unless a "literary" author like Ishiguro or MArgaret Atwood in the case of sci fi deign to go down into it.
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Good writing is good writing, be it a piece of accounting or a literary work. But frowning upon fantasy is just so 1970!
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