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?