GRANNY BARKES FELL IN WOOLWORTH'S
“It will be the rare reader who will not be moved by this highly original, immanently poignant literary work… A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes.”
A.N. Wilson
Don't forget folks. Granny Barkes Fell in Woolworth's will make a great stocking-filler this Christmas.
GENE
From a book review in the Carnlough and Cushendall Readers' Circle Bulletin, December 2024:
ReplyDelete" 'Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths' is a derivative, nonsensical alphabet soup, 'Finnegan's Wake' fifty-times watered, devoid of form, rhythm, insight and meaning. Mr Vincent claims, on the cover of 'Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths' that his writing has 'drawn comparison with James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh and Ernest Hemingway'. One can only assume that the comparison was made only for the purpose of emphasising how complete is Mr Vincent's failure as a writer; it can mean nothing else.
'Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths' was eight years in the writing and consists of fewer than eleven thousand words of slipshod, incoherent and meaningless drivel, a sort of literary Scrabble board, bulked out by seventy five pages of poorly framed, unsystematically assembled and uncaptioned black and white photographs, mainly copied from libraries of out-of-copyright newspaper archives.
It is interesting too that Mr Vincent was forced, immediately after publication of his dreadful little book, to withdraw the original cover photograph when it turned out to be of a distinguished American evolutionary biologist whose descendants might be expected to object to their grandmother's portrait being used in such a disrespectful fashion - and without permission - to adorn such a shoddy piece of work.
And, in a way, that elementary procedural mistake sums up Mr Vincent's literary character. He is, as ten minutes spent with his blog will prove, an inveterate plagiarist. Certainly, whenever these writers come across a sentence or paragraph in Mr Vincent's writing that shows a degree of style, wit, grace or polish, we google it immediately to find whence it has been stolen - and in nine cases out of ten, we find it, stolen from a writer of genuine accomplishment. But, crucially, Mr Vincent's plagiarism is not only inveterate but also incompetent, in that it is always almost easily detectable. It is beyond these writers' psychiatric competence to estimate what this says about Mr Vincent's state of mind, but it does account, at least to an extent, for the unremitting, almost dedicatedly-sustained awfulness of 'Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths'."
Finally - and although the market is not infallibly a reflection of the literary worth of a book - it is worth noting that, almost exactly a year after it was published [on December 23rd 2023], 'Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths' is listed, in the Amazon Best Sellers list, in the 3, 383, 509th place. Given that Mr VIncent was unable to persuade any other retailers to stock his book [a print - on - demand vanity publication], this suggests that his book has sold rather fewer than a hundred copies in twelve months.
In summation, it is perhaps appropriate to the quality and derivative nature of Mr Vincent's book to borrow a final critique from Willliam Eli Miller, an American newspaper columnist, writing in 1929:
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
H. Lewis Allways, Kenneth Miles and Pauline S. Burton,
President, Chair and Vice Chair,
Carnlough and Cushendall Readers' Circle
This is hardly consistent with the comments of A.N. Wilson.
ReplyDeleteGENE
That is because Mr Wilson has neither read your book nor reviewed it. Had he done so, he would not have reviewed it in anything like those terms. For one thing, I imagine that Mr Wilson knows what “immanent” means, whereas you clearly don’t. Do you seriously imagine that anyone is taken in by this ridiculous kissing of your own arse?
Deleteimmanent
ReplyDelete/ˈɪmənənt/
adjective
existing or operating within; inherent.
"the protection of liberties is immanent in constitutional arrangements"
Similar:
inherent
intrinsic
innate
built-in
latent
essential
fundamental
basic
ingrained
natural
(of God) permanently pervading and sustaining the universe.
Similar:
pervasive
pervading
permeating
omnipresent
[Yes, Gene, we can all copy and paste from online dictionaries, and I am not going to get drawn into an another of your pointless arguments.
DeleteThis review of 'Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths'
“It will be the rare reader who will not be moved by this highly original, immanently poignant literary work… A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes.”
was not written by Andrew Norman Wilson [born 1970].
It was written by you, Gene Vincent.
You can't even kiss your own arse convincingly.