Speccie: Reader Repellent
 

Rare is the week when neither Bazza nor Bill bring home the cheese. But, unless Clementine Travers is one of us, we failed to score this week. George Simmers and I were nearly there.

The Competition is prose alas. Or alas for me anyway.

No. 2675: Reader REPELLENT
You are invited to submit a book-jacket blurb for a well-known work of fiction (please specify), designed to be as off-putting as possible (150 words max.). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 November.

I have a suspicion that Clementine Travers may well be closely related to Catherine Tufariello, who posted that terrific piece of Whitmanesque on this site.

Sounds good to me. I don't know any Brit who knows more than jack shit about Whitman. But Catherine Tuff, she knows more than enough. Come along, Catherine. Confess.

Good detective work (if you're right), George. Sounds feasible; people very often use the same initials as their real name, for an alias - er... especially criminals! ;)

So, if you see Jezebel Orinocoflow winning poetry prizes, it just might be me!

You are right, George. My own easy-peasy detective work turned up Cally's post on the 'Competition' thread, plus a quick look back to the 'Cheese comp' thread as well - yes, it's Catherine aka Clementine.

Nice one, CT.

Yes, of course it's Catherine, who has now won in her first two outings, including her debut that took the fiver, as this one should have done.

Clementine, a dear friend of mine too shy to post under her own name, sends her heartfelt thanks for the felicitations. (My own entry, inspired by Auden's "A poet's wish: to be like some valley cheese...," met a less fortunate fate.) John and George, you should certainly have been among the winners. In fact I thought yours had bonus fiver written all over it, John.

I'm trying with this one, for "The Code of the Woosters"

A feeble-minded young man lives a life of useless pleasure in London, until inveigled into crime by a bullying relative. Admirers of the grimmer works of George Gissing will appreciate this author's remorseless chronicling of his anti-hero's increasing desperation as he struggles to escape the consequences of his actions. Daringly, Wodehouse makes the simpleton himself the narrator of the story, so that for two hundred pages we are trapped within the confines of his limited sensibility as he struggles to make sense of his plight, his only intellectual resource a collection of tags vaguely remembered from a wasted education. Cunningly, the book's subtext implies a quasi-Marxist analysis of class relations, as the hopelessness of the book's anti-hero is contrasted with the resourcefulness of those doomed to waste their existences in the servants' hall.

George, that's a winner!

Yes, George. I wouldn't read that book in a thousand years. Mind you, the mention of Gissing was enough. He's like Zola without the brio.What about Just William as an abused child?

Actually, I rather liked New Grub Street when I read it many years ago, grim as it was. I'm not in a hurry to re-read it, though.

Repellent enough?
 

"Thar she blows!"
If these words fill you with the irresistible urge to sail off in pursuit of the great leviathan, this is the book for you! With a genius for meticulous detail, the author re-creates, in little more than 600 pages, the squalor, the terror, the tedium, of an actual whaling voyage. Enjoy the thrill of piercing the flesh, of witnessing the death throes, of watching the sea turn red with the blood of the fierce behemoth! Wade knee-deep in blood and gore, gag on the stench of burning flesh, as you stir the boiling blubber in the great trypots! In this era of "whale watches," of ecological awareness, of international bans on whaling, it's hardly possible to experience first-hand -- short of signing onto a Japanese whaling fleet -- the lost art of hunting down these mighty monsters of the deep. This book is the next best thing.

The Old Man and the Sea
 

Imagine you are at a cocktail party when you are cornered by a white-bearded geriatric fisherman who offers to regale you with yet another story about "the one that got away." If the old man happens to be named Santiago, refill your glass, have a seat, and call the babysitter to warn her that you're going to be late. Santiago will share every last thought that passed through his head during the tedious hours before the mighty marlin first nibbled his bait, as well as every syllable of the interminable, one-sided conversation by which he bonded with the fish and came to call it brother in the hours to follow. What? You don't get out much to cocktail parties these days? Don't worry. Tbe entire story, in painstaking detail, is contained between the covers of the remarkable book you now hold in your fortunate hands.