Charles Willeford mentions an orthodox Jew's favourite brand of tuna fish - not kosher (no scales)! Ian Fleming seems to think that in Istanbul, the Golden Horn separates Europe from Asia. Can you think of similar examples?
2007-01-01 21:19:03 · 14 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
Can't remeber the title of this book. I was so disgusted that the author hadn't the foggiest. The main characters set off for a weekend in Lake District. Fine, but they just go up the M1 to the Lake District...perhaps there's another Lake District that is hidden on the Eastern side of the country. There were more boo-boo's in the book after that.
Just for the record, the Pennines would be in the way.
2007-01-02 10:07:04 · answer #1 · answered by i_am_jean_s 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I cannot remember the name, I think it might have had something like 'Blumsfield' in the title. I was sleeping over at my friend's when I was a kid, or rather not sleeping. I randomly pulled the book off of the shelf and whipped right through it.
It had my attention, largely because there's a sort of time travel theory in there. Basically, a widow and her son and daughter are going to be caretaking an old house until anybody with a blood connection to the late owner could be found. The kids, while playing around, meet the ghosts of a girl and boy who lived there a few centuries earlier. They keep flitting back in time not only to save him, but also another boy who is a servant.
It was a case of an uncle wanting their inheritance and arranging an 'accidental' fire that killed the three children.
The part that aggravates me is that after they've saved these children and return to the present time, they are revisited by the attorney who has the astonishing news that THEY are the heirs to the house and fortune. Apparently the boy from the past's line had died with the latest owner, so they had to backtrack until they found his sister's line (she married the servant boy and moved to America).
This is a massive paradox error that grates on me still. Think about it - in the beginning, these three kids died in the past. So how is it that the present day kids can exist when they were heirs by virtue of descending from two of these dead children? Sorry, no, can't happen. They wouldn't exist in a timeline where the ghost children had died.
Aargh. I once even saw a movie in a rental store based on the book and rented it on the odd chance somebody realized the flaw and fixed it somehow. No such luck.
2007-01-01 22:44:58 · answer #2 · answered by ? 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Plenty of them around! For Dumas, Charlemagne or Charles the Great (9-th century)stopped to talk to a peasant sowing his potatoes (which came to Europe only as part of the "Columbian exchange") That's a tall one. For Jules Verne, in "the Carpathian Castle", Romanians (my people) were "becoming extinct" around 1870 or so. We were very much alive back then and now we're the 7-th biggest nation in the European Union.
One summer, I stopped near a book stand and browsed through one of those cheap, espionage-adventure books by an American author. I usually don't read that kind of stuff but then I was in the mood of doing just that! Call it temporary insanity :) It ended when I read that "the Chechens were a Slavic, Orthodox nation, related to the Russians, but different from them and at odds with them". I can't recall the book or the author, and I think they don't deserve it, either.
But nobody beats Kostova's " Historian";of course, most Western readers, being unmaware of Romanian history, are inclined to buy this heap of factual errors, nicely wrapped in fake erudition;which is quite tragic.
Happy New Year everyone!
2007-01-01 23:07:15 · answer #3 · answered by Cristian Mocanu 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Bernard Cornwell "Sharpe" series has a few in them.
The best is that in one book Sharpe meets Harper for the first time and in the next book they have been friends for years !!!
There is also a lot of "Creative bending of History" which leads to errors & slightly unbelieveable situations
EG - Sharpe 1st person to steal an imperial eagle - WRONG
Sharpe was in Trafalgar & Waterloo - WRONG that honour goes to a Spanish Captain, the only one recorded to do so.
2007-01-02 02:08:19 · answer #4 · answered by David 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Some authors use anachronistic elements as a stylistic device. The Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr has his novel "Die letzte Welt" (English translation "The Last World") set in Roman antiquity, but quite efficiently uses little impossibilities (such as someone speaking into a microphone). Great book, by the way!
2007-01-01 22:40:39 · answer #5 · answered by Sterz 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Apparently, Ian Fleming also seemed to think that homosexuals couldn't whistle. It was mentioned in one of the Bond books - I'm just not sure which. Very strange.
2007-01-02 08:17:07 · answer #6 · answered by Sarah A 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I once read a book by a female author (name happily forgotten) set in Devon, England immediately before the invasion of France by allied troops in 1944. She describes how the troops practised the landings on the beaches of Devon (as indeed they did), but in her version 'supported by helicopters' which certainly were not used in the Normandy landings (or at all in WW2, although I can be corrected on that)
2007-01-01 21:48:43 · answer #7 · answered by rdenig_male 7 · 3⤊ 0⤋
Agatha Christies' The Pale Horse had a plot that was impossible; some of her later work was very confused- Postern of Fate is virtually unreadable.
2007-01-02 03:16:50 · answer #8 · answered by Vivienne T 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
In the play Julius Ceasar by Shakespeare the plotters hear a clock strike, but there were no chiming clocks in Roman times.
2007-01-01 23:20:15 · answer #9 · answered by happyjumpyfrog 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I was reading Elizabeth Bonhote's Bungay Castle - a gothic romance that happens somewhere in the early Middle Ages :) but they all got modern guns and watches in their waistcoat pockets :) very funny
2007-01-01 23:18:33 · answer #10 · answered by mikkenzi 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋