Jafar's Reviews > What We See When We Read

I started off liking this book. I thought Mendelsund was on to something interesting and original. But the more I read, the more I felt I was reading something by a postmodernist writer. You know the type. They sound high and mighty, but in the end it's impossible to tell what their point is, assuming they have a point.

Mendelsund makes a great deal of how we imagine the characters of a novel look like. Well, I, for one, make no attempt to imagine how Anna Karenina looks like when I read the novel. What interests me is the ideas and dialogs and thoughts and actions and feelings of the characters. Whether Anna Karenina looks like Keira Knightly or not is besides the point. Same with locations. I find it irritating when a tiresome writer spends pages upon pages just describing how a room looks like.