Revelling in the music of words
From our UK edition
There’s a chapter in this mostly illuminating and occasionally irritating book in which the author – the award-winning writer of The Hours and other acclaimed novels – explains why he no longer reads reviews of his work. The decision was prompted first by an ‘excoriating’ hatchet job by Michiko Kakutani, erstwhile lead literary critic of the New York Times. ‘A worse review is difficult to imagine,’ Cunningham notes, claiming that he has ‘mostly repressed the memory’ of its contents, though he does share his rather macabre plan for revenge: to slip a copy of the book into her coffin so that ‘extra-terrestrial archaeologists’ will assume she wanted to be buried with it.
