This and Animal Planet are two books that I picked up on spec trying to broaden my literary horizons. Perusing the back covers, they both had high praise heaped on them by respectable journalists. So I bought them. More fool me in this case, it should have occurred to me that books always have good reviews on the back, but no, naïve little me, I thought that if people had said something nice about this book, it must mean that it's good...

Anyway, here's a single sentence quoted from this book:

"There is another loud, mainly feminine cheer with canine echo and Vikram Griffiths, stocky, charming, brilliant, makes a mistake, whether of grammar or fo stress, or of both - of both - with almost every Italian word he utters, though apparently he speaks Welsh perfectly, and what he is not saying of course to these students who have come along to support us, and in some cases one imagines with genuine altruism, sacrificing precious hours and days that they coud have used revising for the exams that are to be held immediately upon our return - what he does not say is how little work we foreign lectors do for our living, how long and lazy our summer holidays are, how little some of us are qualified, how many of us got our jobs because we just happened to know the professor with the ggift in his hand, and one of us is having a lesbian relationship with her professor and another is taking money together with his professor to fix exams on behalf of rich and incompetent students, and many of us worked for our professors privately in langauage schools and translation agencies before we got our jobs, so that getting them was just an extension of an already established collaborazione, as the Italians like to put it, and he doesn't say that many of us have been deeply corrupted by receiving an easy and not ungenerous salary for work that nobody checks or even remotely cares about, and that most of us are terrified by the idea of having in some way that corresponds, however remotely, to the amount of effort we put in."

Do you see why I didn't get past chapter three? Still, it's got a beautifully printed cover with spot UV varnish and a slightly embossed logo. And that's the best thing I've got to say about it.

Ben gives it:

Price: £9.99 (paperback)
Published by: Secker and Warburg (ISBN 0-436-20213-1)

last updated: 14th June 1997