Not only its rampant sexism and classism (“Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Salman Rushdie-and we know nothing of his manicure.”) but also its unwillingness to enjoy itself. Today, after learning of Hilary Mantel’s death, I revisited her review, and was struck again by its funny, acid, generous brilliance, both as a piece of literary criticism, and as a piece of harsh, entirely deserved criticism of literary culture. The controversy, which Mantel lay out in her piece’s opening, was that Atkinson-a 44-year-old debut novelist, and a woman, a divorced woman with who children, who occasionally made money cleaning hotel rooms-had won at all, instead of Salman Rushdie, for The Moor’s Last Sigh. My mother gave me the book when I was in high school-both of us entirely unaware of the “controversy” that surrounded Atkinson’s Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Prize win-and I read it so many times that it eventually broke into three pieces (which I continued read). Behind The Scenes At The Museum: The unforgettable prizewinning debut novel Kindle Edition by Kate Atkinson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition 7,248 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 16.99 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0. By the time I read Hilary Mantel’s 1996 review of Kate Atkinson’s debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum in the London Review of Books, the novel had been a favorite of mine for over a decade.
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