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A review by inkdrinkerreads
The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams
5.0
Langxiety (noun):
The trepidation one feels when writing a review about a book that celebrates words and wordsmithery.
Indeed, I’m feeling more langxious than usual in writing a review of Eley Williams’ ‘The Liar’s Dictionary’, one of the most erudite and eloquent novels I’ve ever read. I’m also aware that 90% of reviewers will likewise pepper their appraisals with false dictionary entries and so there’s not only pressure to be verbose but also to avoid cliche.
Alas.
Lingdifferent (adj):
The state of knowing your review will be pretentious and clichéd but going ahead anyway, with abandon.
This refulgent book will be polarising but if you’re a lover of language- like me- and see words as notes to play in the symphony of communication, not just as conveyors of meaning, then you will love it. Williams’ use of language is exuberant, playful, joyous and musical, resplendent in its semantic meandering, but also precise and lucid in its prose.
The novel tells two lexicographical love stories, set over a century apart. One, located in 1899, follows disaffected oddball Winceworth, a lexicographer for Swansby’s Dictionary, who feigns a lisp to his colleagues whilst also being tasked with cataloguing all the ‘S’ words. Bored of his job and exasperated by life, he takes small pleasure in surreptitiously slipping in fictitious coinages ('mountweazels') of his own devising into the dictionary. It it Mallory’s job, some 100 years later, to unearth these fabricated denotations from the dense (but infamously unfinished) dictionary, all the while evading violent hoax calls and dealing with her deadbeat employer.
Though the plot is arguably a little threadbare, Williams’ writing is hilarious and poignant in all the right places, offering an absorbing and ingenious meditation on language and love. Williams gleefully revels in her virtuosic command of language and I was constantly highlighting new words and researching others. At its core, this book is about the beauty, precision and joy of language, but it’s also about its gaps and spaces, the areas of meaning and feeling that no lexicographer has been able to tidily catalogue or reference. It’s very twee in a quintessentially British way and reminded me of Douglas Adams in its droll and witty humour. In short, it’s a delight. I loved it.
The trepidation one feels when writing a review about a book that celebrates words and wordsmithery.
Indeed, I’m feeling more langxious than usual in writing a review of Eley Williams’ ‘The Liar’s Dictionary’, one of the most erudite and eloquent novels I’ve ever read. I’m also aware that 90% of reviewers will likewise pepper their appraisals with false dictionary entries and so there’s not only pressure to be verbose but also to avoid cliche.
Alas.
Lingdifferent (adj):
The state of knowing your review will be pretentious and clichéd but going ahead anyway, with abandon.
This refulgent book will be polarising but if you’re a lover of language- like me- and see words as notes to play in the symphony of communication, not just as conveyors of meaning, then you will love it. Williams’ use of language is exuberant, playful, joyous and musical, resplendent in its semantic meandering, but also precise and lucid in its prose.
The novel tells two lexicographical love stories, set over a century apart. One, located in 1899, follows disaffected oddball Winceworth, a lexicographer for Swansby’s Dictionary, who feigns a lisp to his colleagues whilst also being tasked with cataloguing all the ‘S’ words. Bored of his job and exasperated by life, he takes small pleasure in surreptitiously slipping in fictitious coinages ('mountweazels') of his own devising into the dictionary. It it Mallory’s job, some 100 years later, to unearth these fabricated denotations from the dense (but infamously unfinished) dictionary, all the while evading violent hoax calls and dealing with her deadbeat employer.
Though the plot is arguably a little threadbare, Williams’ writing is hilarious and poignant in all the right places, offering an absorbing and ingenious meditation on language and love. Williams gleefully revels in her virtuosic command of language and I was constantly highlighting new words and researching others. At its core, this book is about the beauty, precision and joy of language, but it’s also about its gaps and spaces, the areas of meaning and feeling that no lexicographer has been able to tidily catalogue or reference. It’s very twee in a quintessentially British way and reminded me of Douglas Adams in its droll and witty humour. In short, it’s a delight. I loved it.