Customer Reviews

Romanticism and Its Discontents

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I have read all Anita Brookner's novels. I like some of them better than others, but all are interesting, well written and make you think days after you have finished reading them. I read "Romanticism and its Discontents" when it first came out and loved it. I was thinking how fluid and elegant her writing is. Her style is impeccable. The book is enjoyable, certainly for the average person, if not for everybody. I read scholarly books too, and very often come out thinking what a shame it is that in today's world scholarly books have to be "dry"and the writing "pompous" to be taken seriously. Many of these books really read like PhD theses - books that are written specifically for the purpose of obtaining the PhD. and are in fact terribly boring, devoid of life or/and showing no enthusiasm for their subject - certainly not written with the readers in mind. These books you read them when you really have to, and forget them just as fast.

Pluses: much shorter than her appalling book on J. L. David
Negatives: Not having a point of view, being a diffuse writer with uncontrollable tendencies to quick generalizations, not being informed by a valid analytical framework for art history. Without a Booker Prize, this would have been tossed immediately by potential publishers (and they may well have tossed their lunch).