The review, posted on November 12, 2014, and long unnoticed by readers browsing the website, reads:
I didn't buy this book
As soon as I've read it, with bated breath, from beginning to end, I understood that it is a piece of critical writing deeply misunderstood by all readers, including myself. In a feat of concision, the author liminally comments on the science of limnology the way someone who does not swim might undertake an in-depth analysis of a landlocked basin of water. He says, "I didn't buy this book" the way the non-swimmer would say, "I never went to the lake." He gives the book one star, which, better than five stars, is symbolic of the conceptual darkness surrounding the book and hints at the impossibility of reading it. "I didn't buy the book" means, we might speculate, that the book is beyond his means (the reader-to-be is short of funds, or perhaps even deeply in debt); or that there are no bookstores within reach, or yet, the reviewer lives in an area so remote that postal service does not offer home delivery, and because of his debt (see the first hypothesis) he cannot afford a post office box; or that the reviewer stole the book, and this is in fact a confession of his crime (and it is up to us, the review readers, to solve the mystery, which is not who dunnit, but how he dunnit); or that, wracked with guilt (see the theft hypothesis), he is unable to read it, and manages only to circumnavigate its hardbound perimeter, and at best uses the dust-jacket for warmth. It is possible that the reviewer is himself a non-swimmer and that, in an attempt to learn to move in a body of water with the help of only his own body, he felt the need to reach out to a body of knowledge that would reveal the secrets of the lake. However, despite all the information it might have contained, the book turned out to be useless as a flotation device, and sank. The reviewer survived. His book review is, in fact, a testimony to his survival of the encounter with the book which he did not buy. Like other reviewers of this review, I answered the question, "Was this review helpful to you?" in the negative, because, despite all its insights, I still can't swim.
