Nicholson Bakker apparently tends to write slow, thoughtful and literary texts- I say ‘apparently’ because I know this now, but not, unfortunately, when I started reading, and my expectations made for a disappointing reading experience. Instead of ‘contemplative literary novel’, I was primed for ‘book-themed thriller’, largely because I’d picked up The Book Thief and The Thirteenth Tale around the same time as The Anthologist, and both of those books are thriller-esque. All of which makes this review hard to write as an objective assessment […]
A middle-class, middle-aged poet of middling success
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker