Potter spotter: Wash Post disses HP, & is it right?

[pippin_999]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "frantyck" <frantyck at y...> wrote:
> Hi all, and Happy New Year!
> 
> Saw this in today's Washington Post. Bob Levey's column in 
the Style 
> section mentioned Harry Potter. Here's the quote:
> 
> "She is the kind of contemplative child whom parents and 
teachers 
> dream of -- a talented student who prefers Dickens and 
Dumas to 
> Harry Potter."

   Since the girl is a French native speaker, she may have already 
read Dumas in the original (it's not "English" literature) and 
found reading it in English translation an enjoyable way of 
stretching her English vocabulary. I used to do the same thing 
with French and German translations of Tolkien. 


> 
> I've always thought it interesting that the HP books are so 
highly 
> visual in terms of the way a reader imagines what's going on. 
There 
> are doses of humour, doses of powerful emotion, the sense of 
being a 
> watcher rather than a reader in some ways, very movie-like in 
the 
> way it transmits to the mind. In the age of the movie, and at 
least 
> in the age of the aggressively visually-presented, Rowling very 
> effectively stands across that gap between the world of the real 
> eyes and that of the mind's eye. Her books do not, by and 
large, 
> depend on the 'quality' of her prose, however that is defined.

   I'd say Rowling's style is cinematic rather than visual. One thing 
that stands out comparing 19th century novelists to their 
latter-day counterparts is that contemporary writers don't have to 
describe what anything looks like.  Our imaginations are stocked 
with images from TV, magazines and movies. All Rowling has to 
say is "magnificent marble staircase" whereas Dumas or 
Dickens would have let you know exactly what was magnificent 
about it. I don't think this is a defect in modern prose, just a 
stylistic difference, but it does let modern writers move things 
along much faster. You really have to develop a taste for the 
slower pace of earlier novels. 

Pippin