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This Lydia Millet blurb is sending me: “a clear triumph for VanderMeer, who after numerous works of genre fiction has suddenly transcended genre with a compelling, elegant and existential story of far broader appeal.” She doesn't think much of translated literature either!

What she specifically said in my presence was that something "smells of the translator" and the usage of an olfactory metaphor is quite a choice—it's usually a tool of class paranoia. It's par for the course she'd consider genre to be something "lowly" to transcend. People really think like this!

Anyway, that was today's dispatch from the paranoid site of productive ambiguity.

She sounds like one of those “if I like it, it can’t be genre” people.

...but .. why? I see similar genre boundaries in music and man, in both music and literature I really struggle to know what any genres is or what it is of stuff I read. Why does it matter lol. I barely know the genre of any of the books I read. What do people gain from this haha

You would have to ask her but I suspect it's a sense of superiority which is cheap balm to her sense of insecurity