The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Monday, October 07, 2013

Better Than Being A Banknote

Modern readers, it appears, are too thick-headed to understand that the world was not always as we now behold it. In order that such literati should not miss out, a project has been set up to produce garbled versions of Jane Austen's novels "with a contemporary twist". This kind of thing has been done before, notably with the "colorising" of black-and-white films (monochrome is so dull, and the real world is in colour anyway) and the more recent updating of Enid Blyton's books for the benefit of children who might go into shock at the idea that people once spoke and thought differently from the way they do now.

In Austen's case, apparently, the idea is to go through the texts replacing outmoded things with modern things: worries about draughts with worries about vitamins, for instance. Such artistic accomplishment is worthy of Microsoft Word's search-and-replace facility, but has instead been farmed out to some hustling contemporary writers: "This is a project which requires consummate respect above all else," gushed the grave-robber who defiled Sense and Sensibility, which presumably indicates that appropriate use has been made of single-clause sentences and words of two syllables or less.

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