Posted on June 12, 2008 by Steve Pollak
The acclaimed German-Jewish writer Maxim Biller (pictured right) just had his first English-language book published. He also just had his first English-language panning of said book, compliments of The Forward's literary critic Joshua Cohen.
Cohen began his review of Love Today: Stories by saying "Maxim Biller is a bad writer." It only gets worse from there:
When one is a budget Raymond Carver, it’s probably better to slip from the bed at midnight and leave minimalism behind. Biller has cuckolded Carver’s stripped prose, as well as his subject — the impossibility of men and women getting along — and has mixed two other ingredients into this lightest of cocktails (Biller mixes metaphors, too, when he doesn’t altogether forget them): exaggerated Jewish pride, which comes from living in a Germany so rapidly changed, and the culture of “emo,” which can be defined as a wounded but willed innocence, whether lazy or scared, and is too often a capitulation to counterforce, a refusal to recognize the difficulties of love. (It also should be remembered that Biller is a journalist, author of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung column “Moral Stories,” which he has defined as dealing “with Jews, Germans, Hitler and sex.”)
“Love Today” is the first collection of Biller’s stories to bore our language, the most readable of which is “The Mahogany Elephant.” As it’s available online, one can perform a search and profit if not from the story then from a savings of $23.
What Cohen leaves out, however, is that "The Mahogany Elephant" and another story, "The Maserati Years," are available online because they're on The New Yorker's Web site. In fact, both appeared in the print edition of the magazine last year. The New Yorker also published an online-only Q & A with Biller in July of 2007.
So, I guess you've got to weigh your literary cues. Do you give more credence to the editors of The New Yorker, who lavished so much attention to Biller last year? Or, do you go with Cohen's take on the book in The Forward?
Somewhere in between is Nextbook, which published an article about Biller last week. Unlike Cohen, the Nextbook writer, Kimberly Bradley, said Love Today "reveals a more romantic side of the author." She went on to say the stories are "spare, compressed, and melancholy" and that for those who know Biller's earlier work this new book will "seem like a departure."
Not much of an appraisal but we can cut Bradley a break. As we can tell from the existing diversity of opinion, it's apparently not easy to get a read on Biller.
Love Today: Stories is published by Simon & Schuster (224 pages).
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