author photos

I liked reading this article in the Guardian today: "Facing the facts". It's about puting authors' photos on book covers. I totally agree with the writer that sticking authors' photos in readers' faces like that is pretty presumptuous, especially that those photos have become bigger and bigger over the years. Personally, when I read any literary work, I couldn't care less about what the author looks like. Actually, sometimes I don't want to know, I prefer to keep the mystery, or as the writer puts it: "the faceless book has about it a literary purity". I say leave the author's photos for cook books, how-to-become-a-millionaire books and the-golden-rules-for-losing-weight books. But literature is more sublime. Until now, some of the major literary figures that I studied or read their work remain facially obscure to me.


Of course, sometimes you may get really curious to see the face behind the name and it becomes interesting to see how would that affect you. One of the most interesting experiences of that kind happened to me when I was studying Waiting for Godot as a 4th-year undergrad and was reading loads of stuff about Beckett and the rest of his work. I was fascinated by the theatre of the absurd as well as by the unmatched talent of Beckett. I was so curious to see how he looks like (and it was inevitable really) and, I have to say, he had quite an impression on me. Again, as the article says, "this is what a Great Writer looks like".

p.s.
linguistically speaking, I find this sentence in the article very interesting:
"of course not all authors have faces"
isn't it a nice case for semantic truth-conditions? ;-)

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