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Byron In Love (2009)

by Edna O'Brien(Favorite Author)

3.22 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0297855530 (ISBN13: 9780297855538)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

George Weidenfeld & Nicholson

review 1: Among the worst books I have ever read. The text is rambling, disjointed, and filled with grammatical errors and just-plain-ugly verbiage. I am a fan of Lord Byron's work, but this book was so bad that I actually found myself disliking both Byron and the author just a few pages in.It is fitting that Ms. O'Brien is a James Joyce biographer. "Ulysses" was far more intelligible than this train wreck. Ms. Dorothy Parker could have been describing "Byron in Love" when she said "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
review 2: This book jumped off the library shelf at me because though I've heard of Byron, I knew little more than that he was 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' and consorted with his sister, so I thought... more it was time to find out more. Well, the boy certainly was dangerous to know - he had more cases of the clap than a year's intake at the GUM clinic. If he came strolling through my front door, I wouldn't touch him with a bargepole! The book was simply unputdownable - but I've a notion this was more to do with the non-stop exploits of the man himself than Edna O'Brien's writing. I've always believed that with a well-written book you don't notice the writing (the construction, the choice of words) but with an ill-written book, you find yourself forever stumbling over bad construction. This book fell into the latter category. I'm a big fan of commas - well placed, they guide the reader. O'Brien's commas, when they appeared, did nothing to help the flow of the words. I came across sentences with three subordinate clauses and no main clause that I could discern. O'Brien merrily used the personal pronoun 'he' to refer to Byron even though he hadn't been mentioned for a half a page and in between she'd been talking about some other chap entirely. There were some sentences that I simply couldn't decipher and was forced to abandon. Really - don't writers have editors any more? I'm all for the evolution of language and grammar, but writing must be understandable! less

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