In which the BOMC convinces me not to buy a book; or, my nominee for worst ad copy of the year

Ad copy for Alessandro Baricco's An Iliad:

Many of us have probably read parts of Homer's epic The Iliad.  Some may even have slogged through its heavy prose to the end.  Some of you may even have understood what you were reading.  For the rest of us there is this new reworking of The Iliad.  Gone are the pesky line breaks, intrusive gods, and archaic phrasing.  It's the same timeless story, but it now reads like an entirely new book.

*splutters incoherently*

Something tells me that this was not what Joan Shelley Rubin had in mind.

[Update: the source is the Book-of-the-Month News (Oct. 2006): 20.]

Comments

[Wegie]

Oh. My. God.

I think my head just exploded!

[antirealist]

Judging by Nick Tosches' NYT review, the ad copy is spot on.

[Jon Fernquest]

Sounds as fun as reading an abridged version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire without the irony laden footnotes or long periodic sentences.

There must be a Seamus Heaney class translation or even an interlinear translation.

Nothing beats listening to the original language, recited by someone who really knows how to recite, even you can only understand some of it.

[Brandon]

I thought the last line of the ad copy was hilarious. Want to read the Iliad, but have difficulty with the language? We'll give you the Iliad, but rewritten so as to be an entirely different book! Perhaps the next project can be reworking Macbeth to get rid of all that hard-to-swallow stuff about witches and prophecies and floating daggers, and to put it in some other format than that hard-to-read play format!

[mystes]

Its heavy *prose*? What part of "epic" do they not understand?

[oliviacw]

Well, you know, losing those intrusive gods from the storyline probably tightens up the plot a good deal. Yeesh.

[Brian]

Nick Tosches wrote a devastating review of it in last Sunday's NYT Book Review.

[nbm]

Did you see that Our Girl in Chicago (on Terry Teachout's Artsjournaldaily blog, About Last Night) linked to this entry?