Clichés in reviewese

nickel

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Ξέρουμε ότι το κλισέ είναι (η γαλλική λέξη για) το τυπογραφικό στερεότυπο, είναι δηλαδή η τυπογραφική πλάκα που χρησιμοποιείται για την αναπαραγωγή π.χ. ενός κειμένου με το οποίο είναι χαραγμένη. Μεταφορικά, είναι μια έκφραση που κάποτε ήταν ευρηματική και εντυπωσιακή, αλλά πια, από την πολλή χρήση, μπορεί να έχει αντίθετο αποτέλεσμα. Σαν ένα ανέκδοτο με το οποίο γελάς την πρώτη φορά που το ακούς, χαμογελάς την τρίτη και βογκάς την έκτη.

Αυτό που μπορεί να θεωρείται κλισέ στην ξένη γλώσσα δεν το γνωρίζουμε σαν κλισέ όταν μαθαίνουμε τη γλώσσα, ακόμα κι αν είμαστε φυσικοί ομιλητές. Ιδιαίτερα όμως όταν πρόκειται για ξένη γλώσσα, μπορεί να καθυστερήσουμε να αντιληφθούμε ότι αυτή η φράση που ξεσηκώσαμε και θεωρούμε πολύ εύστοχη μπορεί να κάνει τον αναγνώστη ή τον συνομιλητή μας να αναγουλιάσει. Η αναγούλα του είναι ευθέως ανάλογη προς την προσπάθεια που κάνουμε να εντυπωσιάσουμε με αυτό που είναι κλισέ αλλά εμείς δεν το ξέρουμε.

Γι’ αυτό είναι φρόνιμο να μελετάμε πού και πού κάποιο σχετικό βιβλίο (π.χ. The Penguin Dictionary of Clichés) ή να κοιτάμε στο ίντερνετ μήπως η έκφραση είναι πολυφορεμένη. Από την άλλη, δεν θα συμφωνήσω με τον τίτλο αυτής της σελίδας: Clichés – Avoid them like the plague, όταν πολλές από τις εκφράσεις αποκάτω είναι απλές ιδιωματικές εκφράσεις.

Διάβασα όμως προχτές ένα παλιό κείμενο του Tom Payne, βιβλιοκριτικού της Daily Telegraph, για τα κλισέ που χρησιμοποιούν οι εκδότες και οι κριτικοί. Το εισαγωγικό κείμενο βρίσκεται στο φύλλο της 8/8/2004, και μεταφέρω εδώ τον κατάλογο των κλισέ, γιατί τον βρήκα πολύ εύστοχο, πλούσιο και… unputdownable.

  • anything-fuelled — narratives of a new, edgy type of fiction sometimes called Britfic tend to be fuelled by a range of uppers — amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, Robbie Williams
  • as good as any novel — why should writers of fact aspire to the standards of novelists? Cf the truth is often stranger than fiction, infra
  • at its core, **** is a deeply moral work — a handy way for a critic to say that those who don’t like the shocking book under review simply don’t understand it
  • breakneck speed — no successful thriller will go any slower
  • bursting to get out — of novellas in vast, sprawling epics
  • by this stage, I was ready to hurl the book across the room
  • cocktail — the result of stirring one author in with another: “a cocktail of Hergé and the Marquis de Sade”
  • coruscating — to be confused with “excoriating”
  • cracking pace — slower than breakneck speed; too slow
  • darkly comic (cf wickedly funny)
  • deadly earnest
  • deceptively simple — the simplicity of the phrase itself belies how complicated it is. Is the book/poem/style simple or isn’t it? Or does it remind us that to mere readers, something might look simple, and that they need clever critics to undeceive them?
  • divided like the state of India itself — useful way of describing confused characters in post-colonial novels
  • dogged investigation
  • edgy
  • editor should be shot — wouldn’t it be better to shoot those who write “the editor should be shot”? The phrase normally appears in connection with a list of minor quibbles. But to punish editors with this ultimate sanction would lead to a smaller number of editors, not only through their execution but also by discouraging people from becoming editors in the future. The grim consequence of this would be a major increase in minor quibbles
  • emotional rollercoaster
  • epic — as if synonymous with “long”
  • epoch-making
  • event — “a new epic by Homer is always an event”
  • exhaustive, not to say exhausting
  • feisty — of heroines, usually with mention of hair colour — “step forward, feisty redhead DI Dubrovnik”
  • fluent prose — cf Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: “Good heavens! I’ve been talking in prose for more than 40 years without realising.”
  • has it all — as a rule, chicklit stories should feature a twentysomething heroine who has it all, with the customary exception of Mr Right
  • has **** written all over it
  • heady mix — cf cocktail, supra
  • high-octane — of the fuel needed to keep thrillers going at breakneck speed
  • hits the ground running — of stunning debuts
  • icon — as if synonymous with anything famous or even recognisable
  • in an iron grip (holds the reader’s attention)
  • in his inimitable style — incidentally, inimitable people often turn out to be quite imitable: “the inimitable Sean Connery”
  • in true postmodernist fashion he/she constantly invents and reinvents him/herself
  • it reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary poetry/fin-de-siècle Vienna
  • laughoutloud, as in laughoutloud funny. — Ohmygod. Come to think of it, reviewese could soon become a completely textable language, with :-) or:-( to indicate whether or not a book is good. At the time of writing, though, reviewese still uses laughoutloud as an adjective rather than an interjection
  • leafy — not strictly reviewese, but curious: I once saw Harlesden described as leafy
  • lightness of touch
  • like William S Burroughs on acid
  • magisterial (of non-fiction) — any two-volume biography or history can be called magisterial. For single-volume works to qualify, they must reach 700 pages not including notes, bibliographies and appendices
  • **** meets **** — the most quoted example of this construction was the work of Arrow’s publicity department: they described Come Together by Emlyn Rees and Josie Lloyd as what could happen if “Bridget Jones met Nick Hornby at a party given by the housemates of This Life”. For some, what happened when Emlyn Rees met Josie Lloyd was troubling enough
  • minor quibbles, as in, “But these are minor quibbles”
  • (the) name of that young German corporal was Adolf Hitler
  • overnight sensation — I do enjoy how slightly rude that sounds
  • panoramic sweep
  • penetrating insights
  • politically correct — an appealingly easy target, hence “political correctness gone mad”
  • pure/complete unadulterated bliss/codswallop
  • rattling good read/yarn
  • (the) rest, as they say, is history
  • searing indictment
  • searingly honest
  • shines through
  • should be set reading for David Blunkett and his advisers — the phrase shows a welcome faith in the power of literature to change the world. By now there are a large number of books that should be required reading for George W Bush and his circle, although who knows what difference this reading would make. Compound phrase: this searing indictment of the British judicial system should be set reading etc
  • steeped in scholarship
  • stunning debut — in American reviewese, a young writer can debut stunningly
  • surreal — as if synonymous with odd, wacky
  • sympathetic portrait — cf warts-and-all, infra
  • take one ****, mix in some ****, add a dash of ****, leave to simmer, and what do you have?
  • that rare thing — perhaps it’s worth quoting Edwin Muir on Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: “Here is that unheard of, that supposedly impossible thing, a good German comic novel…”
  • things are not as they seem
  • tour de force (of literary scholarship) — the minimum length for a tour de force, not including notes, bibliographies and appendices, is 400 pages
  • (the) truth is often stranger than fiction — variants of this observation are that fact mingles strangely with fiction, and that life imitates art
  • twentysomething/thirtysomething/somethingsomething
  • uncanny resemblance
  • unputdownable
  • vast, sprawling epic — it is polite to congratulate short-story writers for being able to “compress into a few pages what lesser writers fail to achieve in vast, sprawling epics”
  • Viagra — coined by Charles Spencer in this paper’s notice of The Blue Room, starring Nicole Kidman; he alone should be allowed to use it, but the conceit is now standard reviewese
  • vibrantly alive (poetic)
  • warts-and-all — just as American English can make verbs from other parts of speech, so reviewese can turn whole phrases into adjectives (qv laughoutloud, unputdownable)
  • was, in effect, the first conservationist/feminist/Communist/librarian
  • wears her erudition lightly
  • wickedly funny — less dark than darkly comic
  • will appeal to the serious scholar and general reader alike
  • will stay with you long after the last page is turned
  • woefully inadequate — of notes, bibliographies, appendices and most often indices
  • workmanlike biography
  • writes like a dream

Ναι, τα παραπάνω κλισέ ας τα αποφεύγουμε όπως ο διάβολος το λιβάνι όπως ο Χριστιανός το Κοράνι. Αρκεί να μην τα κάνουμε χειρότερα…
 
Καταπληκτικό! Είναι μια παρηγοριά να διαπιστώνεις ότι ακόμη και οι native speakers των αγγλικών φρίττουν με τέτοια κλισέ.
Αξίζει να διαβάσετε και το εισαγωγικό κείμενο. Ένα μικρό απόσπασμα μόνο:
One publisher told me that a book was a "lie-in-the-bath-with-a-glass-of-wine" kind of book; another that a work was "Alan Bennett meets Victoria Wood". (I wish I'd stopped myself from suggesting that they might have met already.)

Τέλος, ας καταθέσω κι εγώ τον οβολό μου. Ένα αριστούργημα reviewese, γραμμένο για το About a boy του Nick Hornby:
"... utterly read-in-one-day, forget-where-you-are-on-the-tube gripping..."
 
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