Sometimes, one wonders if there are not on average two or three masterpieces of literature published per week. From this perspective, the bookstore tour worries instead of reassures. Because if it were true, the phenomenon would be enough to distress the critic who has not noticed so many pass under his nose in eight days, if not in a month or even in a year! The fault of blurbs, an American phenomenon as their borborygmic statement indicates. These are judgments expressed on the back of the book by literary critics and/or writers; but when the latter enjoys a signature that impresses the greatest number of people, and the superlatives he uses to praise the work in question are so powerful that they exceed the sound barrier, the publisher prints his thoughts on a banner on the cover.
The hyperbole is consubstantial with the thing. After all, it’s all about selling. So we regularly discover “The new Faulkner!” in bookstore windows. or “The next Hemingway!” Excuse me, generally followed by “Génial!”, “Luminous”, “Brilliant”, “Tour-de-force” (in French in the text). We don’t deny ourselves anything. We will conceal the name of the one who, casting a wide net, called an obscure first-time novelist “the bastard of William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison and Jane Austen”. The practice has its detractors: already in 1936, George Orwell denounced “the corrupting and disgusting dimension of blurbs” accused of undermining the prestige of the novel. And again, he had not seen everything, notably the elevator returns from renowned writers blurbisant mutually; and he could not have imagined that in the 21st century, there would be a New York writer named Gary Shteyngart to be crowned “king of blurbs” with 150 books thus flagorned to his credit!
In France, most often, banners announce “Literary start 2023”. Or the name of the author in large letters, including for those unknown to the battalion. Some have kept good habits: “A coming-of-age novel with incandescent spleen” (we shudder in anticipation…). Or an extract from the novel in question at the risk of being counter-productive and making you want to close it immediately: “I know what she was for me. I don’t know anything else about her” (160 pages follow…). Effect also guaranteed for this other: “In addition to the triumph of Russia, Svetlana dreams of a husband”. To say nothing of this one: “Hazel had a blank, black look. She reeked of fury.” Do we really think we will seduce the hesitant reader with such hooks over the cover?
Rififi in perspective in the blurbistan
In the American blurb tradition, an author is asked to exalt the genius of another author: “Powerful. Rarely is a first novel so assured” we see at the moment. It even happens that, for the sake of pedagogy, the banner kills the mystery of the title; thus Bada of which the publisher warns us from the outset, by reproducing the dictionary definition in its typography, that it is a bribe. In general, the marketing departments of publishers respect the spirit if not the letter of the texts from which they isolate a sentence or two to serve the promotion of their book. But it has already happened that some feel betrayed by a sentence isolated from its context and that they discover under their signature reproduced in a flashy banner a judgment completely contrary to theirs.
The ethics of the blurb, to say nothing of the jurisprudence blurbic, are still in their infancy in our human and social sciences; but we can see a promising sign in the stimulating study by Jolanta Rachwalska von Rejchwald from Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin (Poland): “Blurbs or the hysterization of language. The rhetoric of appreciation in the announcement texts on the back cover”.
We await with interest the day when a critic or writer dares to sue for falsified point of view. In the meantime, the Society of Authors in London has just made a public protest to the publisher Bonniers UK following the publication of the book Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson: all the eminently positive sentences from the reviews cited on the back cover have been diverted from their original meaning. Rififi in perspective in the blurbistan !
* Pierre Assouline is a writer and journalist, member of the Goncourt academy