Nailing 'em down . . .
For Cheryl Strayed's memoir, "The Tracks of an Author's, and a Reader's, Tears: 'Wild' by Cheryl Strayed, a Walkabout of Reinvention" (NYT, March 27, 2012), Dwight Garner offers only glowing praise.
But the editors for the International Herald Tribune erred with the title given to the same review in the hard copy, "Losing her toenails, but finding herself" (April 3, 2012), for by putting emphasis through their title on Strayed's pain in "losing most of her blackened toenails to ill-fitting boots," they failed to notice that with so much focus upon Strayed's nails, their readers would be likely to misread the review's penultimate sentence:
The lack of ease in her life made her fierce and funny; she hammers home her hard-won sentences like a box of nails.Ugh. Those 'blackened' nails. Sounds vicariously painful, her hammering on that box of her nails. And a whole box? How many nails did she have to lose before finding herself? I quickly realized, of course, that these were the other sort of nails, but that misbegotten title kept popping back up!
It just wouldn't stay nailed down . . .
Labels: Humor, Literary Criticism
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 3:25 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
"...and recounts how, to lighten her load, she burned each morning the pages she had read the night before. "
Nooooooooooooooooooo!!!
Once, she even accidentally burned herself, thereby lending support to Heine's aphorism, "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."
Jeffery Hodges
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