Criticism
A criticism often levelled at Åsne Seierstad is her tendency to present personal stories which have not been fully cross-checked for accuracy. Her style, blending historical facts with personal accounts, sometimes blurs the boundary between fact and fiction and language gaps can cause misunderstandings. By focusing on such a small group of individuals to present her case, she fails to prove any abuses or wrongdoing is systemic, and therefore cannot easily hold people to account for their actions.
In Angel of Grozny she goes a step further by writing some sections of the book in the third person. She describes events she did not witness, often in vivid and evocative language which is ill-suited to the actual person telling the story. The Manchester Guardian reviewer described the "blurring of reportage and imagined scenes" as "sometimes uncomfortable".
Read more about this topic: Angel Of Grozny: Inside Chechnya
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)