I think Scott’s onto something by offering alternatives to Michiko Kakutani’s reviews. But I think a simple international symbol will suffice:
I think Scott’s onto something by offering alternatives to Michiko Kakutani’s reviews. But I think a simple international symbol will suffice:
Eddie, you’ve lost your sense of proportion.
The circle with the strike out bar symbol is appropriate for certain kinds of public menace—politicans and Adolf Eichmann types like Mike Brownie Brown, But a book critic?
Tsk tsk.
I read Michiko Kakutani’s latest excuse for a book review today (20 September 2006) and have come to the conclusion that “Michiko Kakutani,” like “Keyser Söze,” really doesn’t exist in the same way you or I do…..
Who is Michiko Kakutani? She is supposed to be Turkish. Some say her father was German. Nobody believed she was real. Nobody ever saw her or knew anybody that ever worked directly with her, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked with Kakutani. You never knew. That was her power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world she didn’t exist. And poof. Just like that, she’s gone……..
(Apologies to “The Usual Suspects,” 1995.)
I’am glad to find at least a few people out there who can’t stand Ms. Kakutani. Talk about someone with truly piss poor taste in novels and she airs her opinions like they are handed down from on high. How could the times employ her? Does anyone take her seriously? Yes indeed say no to Michiko Blah-Blah-tani.
It certainly seemed pretty obvious to me that Kakutani didn’t read ATD in its entirety, if at all. There was little of the actual book in the review, and her points–which, having read the book, I don’t agree with at all, but still…–were very general, in that annoying way some reviewers, notably the semi-reclusive Kakutani herself, depend on when they don’t read and/or finish and/or want to finish a book… Kakutani is to contemporary literature as Ovaltine is to breakfast.
The Times keeps Kakutani BECAUSE she is hated. Her condemnation of great literature is just part of the shtick. The het up drama sells newspapers and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, and isn’t by most people who love literature.
Kakutani’s reviews are almost always of a higher literary standard than of those being reviewed. The NYTimes editors are not unaware of this and for this reason have kept her on for all this time. Cringeworthy are her detractors who do not want candid critique but would rather wallow in the background of the mollyfied, the maudlin and the mediocre.