Customer Reviews

Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds

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While this book seems to reflect a lot of research (though without references), the writing is terrible; prose this bad should not make it into print. The book is off to a shaky start in the very first sentence: "From disgruntled Mormons and fake Native Americans to bored students and lustful aristocrats, the bizarre history of literary hoaxers is every bit as revealing as the orthodox roll-call of Western writers, as is their acute appreciation of what inspires, frighten and resonates with their generation." It's hard to know where to begin in fixing that sentence. Thus begins a 328-page bout of logorrhea, not to be reined in by the demands of sense or grammar, let alone style and pacing.

As I moved into Chapter 1, my reader's heart sank. Slogging on, my reader's ear began to protest loudly. The book is a pastiche of several different bad prose styles, from the bombastic to the banal. The bombast (on Australia): "Or is the Antipodean profusion of writerly tricks merely the result of a publishing scene desperate for a short-cut to established literary identity?" The banality: "Out of the grim darkness of the Holocaust there very occasionally comes a story with an ending so lovely that it offers a real message of hope to the world."

Despite a superficial fluency, this writer is not in control of the language. Try this slow-motion train wreck of a sentence: "Key figures in the avant-garde poetry world had been hearing stories for some time about the real origins of the work, and the finger of suspicion pointed most directly at a language teacher at a very minor university in Illinois who had written very knowledgeably about Yasusada and even composed some similar poems himself." Then there are moments of shocking laziness. This closes a section on Binyamin Wilkomirski: "But in a case as bizarre and seemingly never-ending as this one, you never know."

I doubt the editor could even get through the book (errors include "object trouvée" on p. 25, "bardolatory" on p. 32, and "adulterated fantasy" on p. 78). After 328 pages, the book seems to collapse from exhaustion.

The book has additional weaknesses (referring to the American edition). There are no footnotes or bibliography--a stunner for a book aiming to disentangle literary truth and lies. It has no index. The type is set such that words are sometimes jammed together. The jacket design attempts a lame visual pun. The paper even feels low-quality! This book seems to reflect a great deal of research and offers a useful general scheme for classifying hoaxes (partly drawing on the work of scholar Brian McHale). The author makes a smart point about why hoaxes might have been particularly successful in Australia. Unfortunately, it was not written to be read. Maybe it was just written...to be written.

I first heard about this book on NPR, and was immediately determined to read it. The author was very well spoken and the host of the show was full of praise, so when I read the first review posted on Amazon, I decided that the reviewer (and please, I mean no offense now) was clearly some sort of literary snob. I purchased the book anyway.

I cannot apologize enough to that first reviewer, who decried the author's murky, rambling, awkward prose. I have hardly put a dent in the first chapter, and I am already considering giving it up. How this book made it to publication, I have no idea. Who was her editor? I need to know who could let such incoherent drivel pass under his nose and onto bookshelves? I feel like I am an English teacher reading a report written by a Sophomore in high school. The only thing "Literary Hoaxes" has managed to successfully do so far is pique my interest in the subject, which I will be taking to some other book...there HAS to be a better one out there.

While other books treat the subject with more depth, this is an amusing introduction to literary hoxes that spans the printed book era.
The prose style is breezy and informal, not academic, which may be more attractive to the casual reader. Also the book is orgnized into thematic chapters ( religious, celebrity, memoir, etc) and examines the most common reasons for literary hoaxes ( monetary gain, embarrassing another writer, mental illness to name a few). This is a good starting book for anyone interested in the topic , which is a very rich and amusing one.

My excitement of discovering this book is only matched by my profound disappointment. An authoritative book on the history of literary hoaxes is needed but this is unfortunately not the book.The author states in her introduction that 'This history of the most notable literary hoaxes does not claim to be comprehensive'. It is not by any definition. And neither is it a discussion of the most notable hoaxes in literary history. Missing are the most significant cases of literary hoaxes such as 'Report From Iron Mountain', and 'The Teachings of Don Juan'. Far worse is the fact that the book contains no references, no citations, no bibliography, and no index.
This book may also be the same as the author's 'Telling Tales: a history of literary hoaxes' published in the UK.