[Prestidigitweeze]

FJ (or whatever you like to be called):

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm about to leave work, but let me clarify one thing:

I'm not suggesting that reviews by academics and competent professionals are a better alternative for the reader whose taste is closer to that of consumer reviewers', or that professional reviews should be *substituted* for consumer reviews. I'm saying they serve *a different function entirely*.

The Hitchens review of the Polizzotti translation is a case in point. No review I've seen on the Amazon product page gives you any sense of what the translation is like, nor are people's first exposure and assessment of the book as useful to me as Hitchens's (or Quenau's) longer term appraisal. I pay close attention to reviews of translations because I often modify a given writer's method and use it for something which I myself am writing. I happen to think the satire in *Bouvard* can grow tedious over time, esp. for modern audiences, which is why I was studying it for *a short story*. In terms of the translation, I was looking for the best compromise between elegance and immediacy, and one that represented faithfully the gradual change in tone as Flaubert's unfinished book became more naked stylistically later on (which is interesting, because Flaubert's famous empathy for his characters seems to have been something he acquired gradually; his earlier drafts show a surprising amount of contempt for them).

For reasons like the ones I've tried to offer above, I often find Amazon reviews unhelpful. It isn't that they fail as reviews, it's that they usually don't offer the kind of information and insights I need. Besides which, a really informed academic review should have something for the reader at every level; they should have something to offer even those who are more in sync with consumer reviews. You don't have to agree with an instructor to learn from them.

I'm usually more interested in reading someone with insights about a book I'm likely to hate than banal things to say about a book I might very well enjoy.

I often disagreed with Virgil Thompson's taste in 20th century classical music, but I was always interested to learn what he had to say about it. And George Perle is an amazing critic on that subject, even if you hate his compositions or his taste.

And John Ashbery is useful and fun on writers like Raymond Roussel, John Clare and even Henry Darger even if you're the sort of reader who'd pay money to avoid all three!

Piperclassique and caleb: Thanks for the input and kind words.