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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A silly and mostly harmless exercise in literary criticism., October 15, 2010
This review is from: Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles (Hardcover)
I have nothing against reexamining a literary classic. Even with such well-trodden turf as the Holmesian canon, enjoying a familiar story through someone else's lens may provide fresh perspective. So why just 2 stars here? Much of this book is simply Bayard indulging his own specialty (psychoanalysis), ultimately asking the ridiculous question: Are the characters in a book committing crimes behind the reader's (even the author's) back? Bayard: "The book is not the story of an investigation, but a secret narrative of an interminable killing of which the reader is the unconscious voyeur and accomplice." (!) Detective criticism is Bayard's unique approach; he tried it previously with Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery, which appears to have received a lukewarm reception. So instead of Stapleton's dog, we are presented with an alternate murderer. All well and good in the main, but when you realize that Bayard bases his insight on a loose French translation of Conan Doyle's original, most of whatever power his punch may have had is lost. For example, the translator's note on page 144, following Bayard's analogy of Holmes to the Hound, cautions us that, "Bayard is working from a French translation" which renders Conan Doyle's original text of "his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight" to the much narrower "his eyes gleamed like a wolf's." (!!) Bayard registers some good observations, such as questioning why Holmes takes Dr. Mortimer's account at face value ("If Mortimer, for whatever reason, has given an inexact version--for instance by mistaking the prints of some other animal for a dog's--then the detective's whole solution collapses.") or wondering how the dog could perceive Sir Charles' state of vitality so quickly and from such a distance ("How can we think that in such a brief time Sir Charles Baskerville could suffer a heart attack and die, leaving the dog time to make a precise enough diagnosis to decide, in the interest of its dietary preferences, to cease its efforts before reaching the body?"). He also takes a well-placed stab at playing The Game, asserting that the Hound only attacked Sir Henry after Holmes and Watson shoot at it ("Can we reproach a dog hit by a bullet for being overcome with rage and rushing at one of the people it legitimately supposes to be its assailants?"). These however are hardly ample reward for having to slog through the rest of the book. Bayard is pretentious, verbose, and, not insignificantly, unkind to both Holmes and Conan Doyle. He also repeats ("It is said...") the apocryphal black armband story which to my knowledge has never been substantiated by primary sources. Anyone new to the HOUND story would do best to start with the original in its well and creepy goodness: on its own ( The Hound of the Baskervilles: 150th Anniversary Edition (Signet Classics)) or as part of the handy albeit heavy collection ( The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories). Longtime fans have plenty of options, chief among them the third volume of Les Klinger's The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear).
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An overly tricky book that will appeal to or infuriate die-hard Holmes fans, April 27, 2010
Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and psychoanalyst, asserts that in fingering Jack Stapleton and his hound, Holmes nailed the wrong suspect(s): "... I feel there is every reason to suppose that the generally acknowledged solution of the atrocious crimes that bloodied the Devonshire moors simply does not hold up, and that the real murderer escaped justice." In brief chapters, Bayard recounts the well-known plot, describes Holmes's methods of inquiry (along the way noting a number of mistakes committed by the master throughout the canon, both acknowledged by Holmes or Watson and not), presents his own method of "detective criticism" ("The aim ... is to become more rigorous than even the detectives in literature and the writers who create them, and thus to work out solutions that are more satisfying to the soul"), and then delineates all the problems with the received text and solution. Among the problems Bayard highlights are: Why did the hound leave no marks on the first corpse, that of Sir Charles Baskerville? When Selden, the convict, dies wearing the clothes of Sir Henry Baskerville, the hound is never actually seen, so why assume that it was responsible? It does attack Sir Henry near the end, but only after a shot has wounded it first. Bayard also notes that, after fastening on Stapleton as his suspect, reading all the clues as pointing in his direction, and then driving the man out onto the moor to his certain death, Holmes waves away the issue of motive! Watson asks him, "If Stapleton came into the succession, how could he explain the fact that he, the heir, had been living unannounced under another name so close to the property? How could he claim it without causing suspicion and inquiry?" In case you're wondering, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong is probably a satire -- an ostensibly earnest yet loving one. Bayard has created his own minor subgenre, which he calls "detective criticism" and describes in this slim volume, although only one other example has been translated into English: a critique of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, called Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Most regrettable, his 2002 Enquête sur Hamlet, in which he apparently proves that Claudius did not kill Hamlet's father, remains untranslated. Of more than a dozen works published by Bayard in French, the only other to have been translated thus far is the even more sly and cerebral How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, which was a minor U.S. bestseller last year. Though Bayard occasionally gallops into the high alpine meadows of literary and psychoanalytic theory, he still sticks closely to the text he's given. And though he probably doesn't believe half of what he's saying, it does pass the logical plausibility test. It has an inner consistency, and that makes it worth doing -- as a challenge, as a joke, and (dare one say it?) as a work of art. The chapters, as well as the book as a whole, are short. Bayard engages in a bit of psychological and academic gibble-gabble, but never for long. If you know and love the Holmes canon well, you'll probably enjoy it. If you don't, you might wonder what all the fuss is about.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gem, December 2, 2008
This review is from: Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles (Hardcover)
If you are interested in semiotics, freudian analysis, and sherlock holmes (and I am sure most of you are) then this book is a brilliant find. In its frugal, non-franco-typical 188 pages, the author covers a very broad range of topics from contemporary lit-crit to cognitive psychology, while demonstrating a delightful command off Holmes and Holmes critical impedimentia. There are two central ideas. First, Bayard explores the relationship between literary characters and reality, which leads to a quick detour through our collective subconscious. Second, there is a meditation on positivism and pseudoscience, with a shout-out to freudian contributions to the scientific method. These two ideas are dialectically synthesized into the conclusion that Holmes' methods are fundamentally flawed and lead to a flawed outcome in the Hound of the Baskervilles, which quite simply Sherlock fouls up to a fair-the-well. Bayard, with a better understanding of the cognitive processes of real and fictional characters (Conan Doyle and Holmes, specifically) is able to utilize Holmes' techniques of close observation and deduction to discover the true culprit in the tale, which I won't spoil by revealing. His "solution" is analytically compelling and represents a coup de main for the new criticism ideas of close textual reading and multiple interpretations of texts. In fact, he makes those highly academic ideas quite fun while letting that poor doggy off the hook.
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