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The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe (view source)
Revision as of 14:25, 17 September 2017
, 14:25, 17 September 2017no edit summary
'The Kingdom of Speech' takes a long time to make its point, if indeed there is a point at all. Anything that can be said in three sentences is stretched out to three pages, peppered with obsolete ellipses and huge tangents. Wolfe also regularly writes as though from the point of any of his 'characters,' which feels very weird indeed when you get Darwin thinking in fear of Wallace ''once again forestalling ''me'' and ''my'' own ''priority'', this time beyond the reach of any more more monkey business by my Gentleman sidekicks… ''This bastard'' - you get the picture. It doesn't sit well. And it takes up page space. A ''lot'' of page space.
When Wolfe reaches Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett's disagreement over the basic existence of something Chomsky calls the ''language organ'' I felt we were finally getting somewhere. Everett's work is highly controversial and really interesting. But, again we are treated to the same style of attack (''''OOOF!'' - right into the solar plexus!'') without much substance. There is some fascinating information in there, but there's too little of it. Everett, part Christian missionary, part linguist, came upon a hitherto undiscovered Amazonian tribe who completely blew Chomsky's theories out of the water. When I finally felt we reached was the meat of the book, things just… stopped.
Had Wolfe run out of things to say? I may be slightly controversial in positing this, but it seems as though he is out of his depth. Linguistics is not Wolfe's area of study. He's a journalist. And a very readable one - if you like the style. (Which I, personally, do not.) But who is Wolfe to write this book?