The Imperfectionists

"The Imperfectionists , by Tom Rachman. The honest answer would be that it’s written by Gideon Rachman’s brother. I don’t know Tom, but I do know Gideon from my Economist days, and if there was any way that I could get away with recommending Gideon’s book Zero-Sum World under the rubric of journalism, I would do so. But I can’t, since Gideon’s book is about geopolitics after the financial crash. The next best thing I can do is to recommend The Imperfectionists , and give Zero-Sum World a couple of mentions in passing. While noting that, on a strict construction of Economist style rules, there is no need to hyphenate the words Zero and Sum. A masterpiece, actually, once you get past the first chapter, which is a dud. The book is a fictional history of the International Herald Tribune . All the characters are clichés of one sort or another, by intention. But the first chapter is given over to a portrait of a down-at-heel Paris correspondent that just doesn’t work. You have to get into the second chapter, about the newspaper’s obituarist, before the thing starts to sing, and you understand why this was one of last year’s bestsellers. It says something for the reviewers of the world that they didn’t all throw the book away before finishing chapter one. Perhaps they were all friends of one Rachman or the other. One point that I didn’t see made in the reviews, perhaps because it’s not true, is that I think this may be the last good-to-great novel ever to be written about newspaper journalism from first-hand experience. From now on, books about newspapers will be have to be researched from other books about newspapers."

"Tom Rachman is a journalist and this is a journalist’s book, so I’m probably biased. He’s Canadian and he works for the International Herald Tribune . He’s done lots of postings abroad and this is certainly a novel inspired by those postings. It’s the story of a newspaper founded in Rome in the 1950s and we see the lives of 11 different people who work on the paper. It’s just fantastic. There isn’t a word wrong. You never trip up on a sentence. It’s an American newspaper and I don’t know the story of the Herald Tribune , but it sounds like a situation that Rachman and his colleagues might have been in. The reason it’s set in Rome is an element of the narrative I won’t go into but it allows the story to happen. There’s brilliant characterisation and it’s completely engrossing. You really want to read more about all of the people. It is funny, yes. It’s not a laugh-out-loud book but it’s one of those ones where you recognise lots of people. You’ve got a writer who does obituaries and can’t really be bothered to do anything. There are definitely people you know in there."