criticisms online said that it contains historical inaccuracies such as "tito was a serb", when indeed his dad was slovene and his mom was croat, and several complained that it had a very pro-socialist slant.
i don't get how this:
or this:
is pro-socialist though.
i thought the book gave an idea of how people originally would have thought it was a good idea/why socialism got such a strong hold in eastern europe to start, but then was honest about pros and cons (and the fact that there were much more cons). for me, it was entertaining to read. you take it as tongue in cheek, but you still leave with a real sense (at least in general) of the landmark events/situations that have put eastern europe into it's current setup. it's worth a glance at least.
about amazon reviewers, i loved horby's passage (yes, still harping on the polysyllabic spree) where he says:
"In an online interview, Haddon quotes one of his Amazon reviewers, someone who hated his novel, saying, "the most worrying thing about the book is that Christopher says he dislikes fiction, and yet the whole book is fiction." And that, says the author, "puts at least part of the problem in a nutshell." It doesn't, I don't think, because the Amazon reviewer is too dim to put anything in a nutshell. I suspect, in fact, that the Amazon reviewer couldn't put anything in the boot of his car, let alone a nutshell. (Presumably you couldn't write a book about someone who couldn't read, either, or someone who didn't like paper, beacuse the whole book is paper. Oh, man, I hate Amazon reviewers. Even the nice ones, who say nice things. They're bastards too.)"
That passage mostly made me laugh. And I copied it, not just for a laugh here, but also because really.... Although I glace at the average Amazon rating, some people's comments drive me nuts. By and large on non-book products, the people who bother to write bought the product, waited for it to break (all things do eventually) and then wrote an essay to complain. For books, I get annoyed with people who can't spell. I take slightly into account the average rating (out of 5 stars), but actual comments little into account. there are a lot of strange people out there, and i don't trust their opinions until they've set a good precedent for why i should...
anyhow, this past weekend, after buying 2 more books on friday, and before finishing hornby and starting in on the eastern europe history comic book, i arranged my "to be read" stack of a dozen or so books into the order i planned to read them. next up after the comic book was supposed to be the bridge an andau, and that's still near the top, but the comic book motivated me to move something else to the top first:
next in line is one minute stories by istván örkény. it's classic hungarian literature but the only publisher is corvina in budapest. i read it 4 years ago, but it got back into my reading stack because a month ago in budapest, i purchased örkény's more one minute stories, same publisher, more recent collection of his stuff. they're both short (often less than one page) stories about the absurdities of life in socialist eastern europe (örkény died in 1979).
quote from the back:
"supremely deft, witty and poignant, örkény's stories sparkle with the absurd and the inexplicable which he discovers gliding beneath the surface of the rituals, gossip, cafés and intrigues of contemporary budapest. a newspaper misprint, an accident in the street, a funeral, even the instructions pinned to the wall beside a fire extinguisher become the occasion for a meditation on existence. örkény is a master of irony and the arts of survival practiced close to the stuff of ordinary experience."
fact: eastern european culture seems to have a unique dry sense of humor cultivated by the absurdly crazy past history they've survived.
hypothesis: after reading a comic book about said crazy past history, apparently i'm trying to better cultivate my own personal appreciation for said dry humor.
we shall see.
(glances back through what i've just written.... dude, i type up a lot of rubbish, who out there still reads this blog? ;P)
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