Shrewd takedown of Rachel Cusk’s “Aftermath” wins Hatchet Job of the Year Award

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:57:00 +0000

Camilla Long is now the proud winner of a hatchet, a large red cake and a year’s supply of potted shrimp, all thanks to her biting Sunday Times review of Rachel Cusk's "Aftermath." The dubious gifts are a part of the Hatchet Job of the Year Award, an annual honor bestowed by U.K.-based literary website Omnivore to a critic who writes the "angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" of the past 12 months.

Long's review beat vitriol spewed from the likes of Ron Charles on Martin Amis, Zoe Heller on Salman Rushdie, and Suzanne Moore on Naomi Wolf. One the award's judges, Lynn Barber, told the Guardian, "I thought what was wonderful about Camilla's review was that it totally hatcheted the book, but in such an intriguing way that I then thought I must read 'Aftermath' – and did, and loved it because it was just as weird as Camilla said," said Barber. "So a hatchet job isn't necessarily a turnoff."

Your breakup is boring

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:43:00 +0000

The Museum of Broken Relationships, which opened in Zagreb in 2010, is an eight-room gallery of debris left behind by breakups. There’s a cellphone, a wedding dress, a glass horse and a pair of male underpants; also a garden gnome, a set of furred handcuffs, a prosthetic leg and an ax. These exhibits are donation-based, and though the collection aspires to universality it may take a certain kind of personality to give away this kind of keepsake. The ax (“The Ex Ax”) once belonged to a lesbian in Berlin: She used it to chop up the furniture left behind by the woman who broke her heart. She called it her “therapy instrument.”

The caption doesn’t tell if the woman ever came back for the smithereens. But that’s what the late David Foster Wallace did, during another crisis of love in which the woodwork got the worst of it. Wallace’s biographer, D.T. Max, tells the story in "Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace": "[Mary Karr and Wallace] split up … Soon afterward, he got so mad at her that he threw her coffee table at her. He sent her $100 for the remnants. She had a friend who was a lawyer write back to say she still owned the table, all he’d bought was the 'brokenness.'”

Salon.com > Rachel Cusk

Shrewd takedown of Rachel Cusk’s “Aftermath” wins Hatchet Job of the Year Award

Your breakup is boring