You’ve probably noticed that book reviews devote much pagetime to not talking about books. An article from last Thursday’s Economist assures us that this trend lives. It also begs us to wonder why.
The first paragraph, the read-me-this-way paragraph, embarks from Marx’s renewed relevance and Engels’ rearward burner placement. The last sentence introduces a book that discusses their interlaced lives. Give it a look:
WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.
The preceding narrative bits, not the last sentence, are the real segue into the story. It’s a story about Engels, not his ink-arnations. It’s about biography, not a biography, hopping next to the Capital co-writers’ first encounters, Engels’ involvement in the family’s business, then in two paragraphs tells us how Marx and Engels managed to complete their magnum opus. Here the story pauses, remembering that this material came from an actual book:
Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with.
But this is an aside. We return to Engels, this time as summary, spinning the foregoing narrative into a more packaged reflection, a sort of epitaph condensed into a phrase in the last paragraph:
When Engels died in 1895, he eschewed London’s Highgate cemetery where his friend was laid to rest. Self-effacing to the last, he had his ashes scattered off England’s coast at Eastbourne—the scene of happy holidays with the Marxes.
How effective is the book in question? We’re left with a handful of unsupported adjectives: ‘A new biography [...] makes a good case,’ ‘Mr. Hunt does a brilliant job [...].’ Any demands for an account of methods or mechanisms turn up empty.
But does the review really want to critique the book? That is what we’d expect after a jaunt through Rotten Tomatoes. But reviews also summarize, put us in the crow’s nest. And I learned something about Engels. The review isn’t about a book, then. In a way, it is the book, or at least tries to whisk us through.
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