Literary Clusterfucks 2013

white middle class cis dude gets rich writing a book about issues, follows his gravy train without really having the imagination or empathy to transcend his research, gets pissy as fuck when called on this, now *that's* a believable narrative

I've 'taught' BiSP a few times and it's bad at almost every level: contextual, thematic, syntactic. That the language is insipid to the point of invisibility is one thing, but Boyne somehow manages to make the text - in a book about Auschwitz-Birkenau, mind - pivot around reader sympathy for a grieving German family.

It does sound thoroughly mediocre, I'm just pining for a critique that goes beyond 'this book contains objectionable material'. Not a fan of the 'let's ban To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' school of would-be criticism.

Jay Hulme
@JayHulmePoet
·

Apr 15, 2019
Replying to
@JayHulmePoet
The most dangerous part is: Though some of the problematic parts of the book can and will be picked up on by almost anyone, much of the issue lies in the overarching themes, inaccuracies, and stereotypes, which will then be perpetuated by the readers.

This last phrase gives the game away imo, there is zero faith in the reader being able to pick apart the book on their own here. They're responding to the book like it's a meme with inaccurate/libelous messaging circulating on social media (which is no doubt a thing that happens in this age of inaccurate items circulating on social media).

white middle class cis dude gets rich writing a book about issues, follows his gravy train without really having the imagination or empathy to transcend his research, gets pissy as fuck when called on this, now *that's* a believable narrative

This post, by contrast, is just pulsing with imagination and empathy.

Cardamon, empathy for an obvious that like Boyne isn't compulsory, so please STFU

Randall Flagg Chocolate bar
@avalanche_andy
·
Jul 19
Replying to
@mimmymum
I presume his next book will be about Black Lives Matter from the perspective of a cop who hurt his knee while killing a black woman.

"It was then that I really came to understand the anguish of hundreds of years of oppression. My knee really hurt."

brilliantly witty that may be but it's very much not what TBITSP is doing

not that i will die on boyne's hill, as i say he seems to have been something of an arse about this latest scandal, albeit i'd need a more detailed breakdown of why his new book is so cancelled

cardamon i know you enjoy white knighting for the oppressed victims of cancellation but

zero faith in the reader being able to pick apart the book on their own here

these are YA books? i think the level of picking apart one expects from the reader might be slightly different to your conventional unreliable narrator.

also as far as i'm aware there's no indication that Boyne's authorial voices are meant to be unreliable.

also the thread which started this conversation revolves around a series of trans people patiently explaining their problems with his book, based on their own lived experience, and his apparent refusal to tolerate any form of criticism whatsoever.

i'm not even gonna ask why your reaction in these situations always seems to be to try and find a defence for the poor gobshite who's attracted the ire of people they've miscategorised, lied about or misrepresented. it's a boring question, i'm sure you've got your own answers.

clearly as far as defending the poor victim of horrible woke Twitter you're not the only one always at it

been a lot of showing of arses about trans issues on ilx lately

these are YA books? i think the level of picking apart one expects from the reader might be slightly different to your conventional unreliable narrator.

This is a fair point btw, although I do take issue with the implicit notion that YA readers are incapable of coping with ambiguity and therefore need to be force-fed a straightforward morality by novel's end.

Fwiw Boyne's rejection of any kind of dialogue post hoc is the most disturbing part of this beef.

Yes.

I've actually met Boyne and I've taught BITSP many times to its intended readership. I don't have any special love for it.Bbut, to be fair... the narrator of 'boy in striped pajamas' is inherently unreliable, and his gradual awakening to the horrors around him does call his voice into question for most of the book. Haven't read the new book one, and I'm not reacting to the book per se, but to Boyne's total lack of humility in the face of (polite) disagreement about his premise and writing.

also as far as i'm aware there's no indication that Boyne's authorial voices are meant to be unreliable.

A 13 year-old boy tho…

xp

xps

To whoever it was telling me to STFU, NV invoked the empathy rule, not me!

For the record I don't think Boyne should have written a trans issues cash-in book in the first place, which is what this book arguably is, the sequel to his holocaust issues cash-in book. As a rule of thumb, you'd want the author of a yes fictional but also commentary text to have better, and to be honest more personal, knowledge of what they're writing about.

Turning that from a rule of thumb to a moral imperative doesn't work, sadly, because it's trying to make a fish climb a mountain.

Also approaching this issue positively - publishers and agents going out to find authors from groups pushed to the edges, reviewers making an effort to get those books into the conversation - gets pretty good results whereas approaching it negatively - finding people like Boyne and having a go - just ends in pointless, hypocritical denunciation.

xp

on a technical level i'd say there's a difference between a narrator with a restricted view and an unreliable one but it feels like a sidetrack here

the more serious indicator of douchiness is the refusal to engage with critical voices, yeah

Also lol @ those accusing me of white knighting for victims of cancel culture, etc. Come come. If this was a forum where everyone went to complain about fucking woke sjws and their cancel culture or whatever, I'd a) not be here in the first place b) be calling all those terms into question as my 'priority'.

also a side-track, but when Wayne booth coined 'unreliable narrator' he included naïveté as one of the prime reasons for unreliability. in Boyne's first book that unreliability is pretty on-the-nose for even a kid at a low comprehension level. 'boy in the striped pajamas' is about a concentration camp commandant's son meeting and befriending a prisoner, and the steps of his awakening as he develops empathy and friendship for the 'striped pajamas' people.

hi, i'm trans, is there something i should be particularly upset about w/r/t this guy? i have twitter blocked on my computer so i'm not entirely sure what the issue is here.

xp that's fair remy, i've not read the books. my point would've been better made by saying that just because the narrator's voice isn't the authors that doesn't mean that the author's attitudes within a book can always be written off as "it's the narrator"

Re: the point about Boyne responding like a bell end to reasonable feedback from trans critics

I am sure there was much reasonable feedback

I wonder if there was also a wall of hostility and people going from book is a bit questionable to author is transphobic, lose him work, get this book out of schools and off reading lists, in 60 seconds flat or less

It would not surprise me if this had happened, on Twitter, nor would it surprise me if him experiencing that had caused him to act like a bell end in response because that is precisely the response that Twitter denunciation is trying to get (whoever's doing it at whoever)

It's really very simple playground tactics, get a group together and have them point at the target saying how terrible they are. Target attempts to defend self. Judges unmoved. Target eventually explodes in anger. This is taken as an example of how terrible they are.

lol @ those accusing you of white knighting for victims of cancel culture

"lol"

the author's attitudes within a book can always be written off as "it's the narrator"

Certainly not, but identifying the extent to which an author's attitudes seep into their works is never as simple as that, if only because the mere act of writing fiction – and/or poetry, for that matter – tends to depersonalize the writer and put them in touch with a version of themselves (and of all things, really) that diverges from day-to-day lived experience. Completely? No, never, but just enough to plant seeds of doubt (…to varying degrees, depending on who/what we're talking about).

well lit crit isn't science, no. but it's not nothing either

For sure, but ime lit crit is often at its most 'scientific' when it refrains from making grand pronouncements about what the author really meant. (I don't give a rat's ass about Boyne btw, this is interesting to me from a theoretical perspective.)

yes i assumed that's what we were doing, probably belongs elsewhere, Boyne convicted himself outside the pages of his books by the look of it

i'm on record all the time as not being very interested in intent, or in meaning as part of some form/function binary

cardamon i know you enjoy white knighting for the oppressed victims of cancellation but (...)

i'm not even gonna ask why your reaction in these situations always seems to be to try and find a defence for the poor gobshite who's attracted the ire of people they've miscategorised, lied about or misrepresented. it's a boring question, i'm sure you've got your own answers.

― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, July 20, 2020 9:18 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

clearly as far as defending the poor victim of horrible woke Twitter you're not the only one always at it

― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, July 20, 2020 9:20 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

If this isn't an accusation I must have misread your authorial intent. Soz!

albeit i'd need a more detailed breakdown of why his new book is so cancelled

― imago, Monday, 20 July 2020 20:12 (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

having read a little deeper into the links from the initial twitter thread it does seem extremely sus at best tbf

It's a cash in, no?

just to spin back to relevance to this thread pom, the difficulty of showing intent works both ways - if your book contains shitty ideas then intentionality doesn't really come into it, the least you can do when people who know much much more about a situation than you do point out what they hate about yr work is listen to them respectfully

no my accusations were just that cardamon, the "lol @ people accusing you" bit was an ironic callback based on you making two or three posts about how awful the woke twitter mob is in bullying people with more media profile and power than them. unless those posts were ironic? who knows, i'm not that interested in intent.

Everyone is asking about the ending... Jessica's mum wants to be Prime Minister. She's on the brink of getting the job when her rival leaks the fact that "her son thinks he's a girl" to the press (cue transphobic headlines). It's made very clear that this has ruined her career.

— Jay Hulme (@JayHulmePoet) April 16, 2019

cancelling boyne for this alone on the grounds of sheer crassness tbh

It's funny, I don't recall mentioning a 'woke Twitter mob'

It's really very simple playground tactics, get a group together and have them point at the target saying how terrible they are

that's enough being trolled i think

Go on?

Boyne convicted himself outside the pages of his books by the look of it

i'm on record all the time as not being very interested in intent, or in meaning as part of some form/function binary

Yeah, I'm on board with all that. Through his responses Boyne seems to have validated the (potentially) reductionist readings of his critics, so tough shit to him. In and of itself, however, and shorn of its (obv. deader than dead) author, the book may have had a chance.

Perhaps. But once again, I don't really care, I'm just annoyed with YA fans who parse every single novel that falls into their lap as clear-cut allegories that swing between Bibles of Absolute Good and Grimoires of Absolute Evil, with nothing in between.

well again, it'd be wrong to make a judgement without close reading a bunch of books, but i feel like that dynamic applies to an awful lot of (in particular) genre fiction for readers of all ages

and again, if you as a creator want to participate on social media for marketing purposes that's fine, just do your marketing and shut up. if you engage with social media then get used to everything being amplified, whether it's fawning praise or people telling you to fuck off. amplification is the nature of the medium

Agreed, you've made your bed, etc.

Speaking of YA fiction, it occurs to me that I've never knowingly read any, even as a YA. Some of the low-tier high fantasy I was into at the time probably counts, though.

I'm trying to parse NV's approach to this stuff and it seems like essentially 'caveat emptor'? Is that about right?

xp

depends whether i can class Ian Fleming and Jackie Collins and Jack Higgins and Frederick Forsyth as YA. i think there's a case :D

Perhaps. But once again, I don't really care, I'm just annoyed with YA fans who parse every single novel that falls into their lap as clear-cut allegories that swing between Bibles of Absolute Good and Grimoires of Absolute Evil, with nothing in between.

A lot of YA authors are also involved in the community, and to some extent play this game cf. Rainbow Rowell

This is rather obvious, but I'm still somewhat amazed by how almost every single time this thread gets bumped, YA fiction is the culprit.

nothing quite like the o.g. YA, Swallows & Amazons

actually S&A is not quite YA as there are not really any themes of budding romance, which seems p crucial for the genre

Robin Jarvis would have to be my YA author of choice then

I had to look that up. It doesn't seem to have exported itself as well as its peers.

ok so here is what i can gather from the context

this boyne fellow decided to write a book about a trans person from the pov of a cis person

the first time any trans person got to see any of what this boyne fellow had to say about trans people was when review copies started going out to the press

some of us had some problems with some of the things he was saying and voiced them

boyne reacted by flying into a tizzy and generally behaving badly

i feel like things might have gone better if he'd given any indication, at any point, of actually listening to anything a trans person might have to say?