The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Antonio Hill's (except in his native Spain where he goes under the name 'Toni Hill') The Summer of Dead Toys.
This is a serviceable thriller, but everything about it feels manufactured -- down to its international success. This apparently easily sold foreign rights far and wide in short order before or around publication. You can see how the specs -- plot outline, main characters -- and the author's translation background (the Wikipedia page even suggests his: "work as a translator was a great help in writing his first novel, as it exposed him to many books and diverse writing techniques") made this an easy sell, and yet all that is at the heart of the flaws of the book whose artificial construction creaks at every turn (even though Hill isn't half-bad as a writer). (Yes, all works of fiction are entirely artificial constructions, but the art is in not letting that show (or in showing it in a specific way): The Summer of Dead Toys reads like a padded blueprint .....)
The international success (in terms of foreign rights sales) of this is Exhibit A (or Z -- there are so many) of what's wrong with publishing today -- specifically the publishing of international fiction. Sure, it's not terrible, and maybe even deserves to be available in English (thriller/mystery readers are an astonishingly forgiving lot, and will put up with a lot), but, even with its (very forced) series-potential, it's not worth paying very much for -- and I'm sure the foreign publishers paid through the nose for this. -- based not on actually reading the novel in its entirety but in swallowing the sales-pitch and maybe reading an excerpt (and, like I said, he certainly writes well enough, so any excerpt would look fine).
(Astonishingly and embarrassingly, the German publisher of this is Suhrkamp, who clearly have entirely lost their way if they're betting on this sort of thing; yes, we've always pretended not to notice they publish Isabel Allende (mainly because they manage to make a mint off of her books, their literary reputation be damned), but this really is beneath and beyond them.)
This is a serviceable thriller, but everything about it feels manufactured -- down to its international success. This apparently easily sold foreign rights far and wide in short order before or around publication. You can see how the specs -- plot outline, main characters -- and the author's translation background (the Wikipedia page even suggests his: "work as a translator was a great help in writing his first novel, as it exposed him to many books and diverse writing techniques") made this an easy sell, and yet all that is at the heart of the flaws of the book whose artificial construction creaks at every turn (even though Hill isn't half-bad as a writer). (Yes, all works of fiction are entirely artificial constructions, but the art is in not letting that show (or in showing it in a specific way): The Summer of Dead Toys reads like a padded blueprint .....)
The international success (in terms of foreign rights sales) of this is Exhibit A (or Z -- there are so many) of what's wrong with publishing today -- specifically the publishing of international fiction. Sure, it's not terrible, and maybe even deserves to be available in English (thriller/mystery readers are an astonishingly forgiving lot, and will put up with a lot), but, even with its (very forced) series-potential, it's not worth paying very much for -- and I'm sure the foreign publishers paid through the nose for this. -- based not on actually reading the novel in its entirety but in swallowing the sales-pitch and maybe reading an excerpt (and, like I said, he certainly writes well enough, so any excerpt would look fine).
(Astonishingly and embarrassingly, the German publisher of this is Suhrkamp, who clearly have entirely lost their way if they're betting on this sort of thing; yes, we've always pretended not to notice they publish Isabel Allende (mainly because they manage to make a mint off of her books, their literary reputation be damned), but this really is beneath and beyond them.)