First book review: The List of My Desires
I wanted to start this blog on a positive note but I decided to be honest and share the truth about my last brutal literary experience. One of the first steps in the recovery process is, after all, to aknowledge the incident.
A few weeks ago I was flying from Paris to Barcelona. A friend gave me a lift to the airport and a book to fill the next 3 hours of boredom and anxiety I usually face at the airport.
The book was "The List of My Desires" by Grégoire Dealcourt. It's now an old story but living abroad and focusing on the culture of my new location, I had very little knowledge about this book. All I knew was that the book did well commercially ; it had been adapted to the cinema and it was the story of an average woman who was sewing, knitting or something equivalent and who won the lottery. That's all I knew before that day.
PITCH : Jocelyn works in an harberdashery in the north of France. She is married to Jo, a factory worker. They have 2 grown up kids who left the house because they are grown ups. Jocelyn and Jo are average Jos. No exciting careers, no exotic location and from the description, they are not especially good looking or ugly. But AHA TADAH: one day Jocelyn wins the lottery but does not tell anyone her big secret. What will happen to her secret and the money ?
Exciting, right ?
When I finished the book, these are the main thoughts that rushed into my mind :
1 - A tree has been sacrificied over nothing.
2 - This was the longest feminine hygiene commercial I ever read.
3 - Writing a book is a real Job.
This "book" is full of cheap emotions, is miserabilist and lacks a genuine story. I kept thinking "fake, fake, fake, fake !!" and that readers deserve a tad more respect than this.
"Fun fact" though : At the end of the book, you can read some testimonials about the product, I meant book. Funny how you never see this at the end of Haruki Murakami's books for instance...
A week later, when I finally got over my anger, a colleague explained to me how amazing were the "50 Shades of Grey" book and movie editions. Another chef d’œuvre that simply reminds us that writing is a real Profession.
I think that what shocks me the most is the obvious over-the-top scenarisation ; why not just sending the script to the movie makers ? And this is not something only about this specific book, the list is getting quite long actually.
To me, more than the e-readers or the fact that libraries shut down, this is the sad mutation of the book industry. The mediocrity of more books that get too much attention and at no point raise any bar (not the bar of literature or good taste at least).