Does anyone read Dave Eggars?
- Thread starter jeanne
- Start date
jenks
thread death
yeah, i loved 'Heartbreaking..' i felt that he was somehow craking open the well worn personal meoir genre in a new and interesting way. As i think i have written before on this forum, he shares a similar technique to Safran Foer - a skirting narrative style where whatever is at teh ehart of the matter has to be approached obliquely, circling around whilst never quite facing that which is diasastrous full in the face.
my only complaint is that i think he could have doen with an editor, but then that's my standard complaint about almost all writers with the exception of Roth (his latest is a slim 200 pages and i could have read double)
i haven't read the second book which seemed to gett a bloody good drubbing in the press but he is about to release his next 'What is the What?' (or something like that) with a central character from the Sudan - it sounds interesting and well worth checking out.
I can see what your friend is saying, but I see it as irony, or as a cover up for someone who is insecure, keeps himself too busy playing games to realise that he is miserable. I guess I just enjoy a bit of childiness in a world that takes itself far too seriously!
Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for it.
old goriot
Well-known member
I agree with your friend. Behind the 'cleverness' it's all a bit vapid. Good style desperately lacking anything substantive or new to say. Yeah yeah, him and his brother have a cute relationship, but when you look beyond that to the treatment of any other relationships in the book (the mother's death from cancer, his sex life) he just seems sort of boring and shallow. And "might" magazine and its editors I found to be really lame. I'm not sure if Eggers was consciously lampooning himself and his friends, but at any rate those parts made me cringe.
I classify him with Zadie Smith, and Safran Foer. They are the literary equivalent of junkfood. A fun read, if you like that sort of thing, but its the kind of book you would never want to read a second time because theres nothing worthwhile going on below the surface (IMO).
IdleRich
IdleRich
Ha, funny you should say that about Zadie Smith 'cause I just read On Beauty and quite enjoyed it at the time - afterwards however I kept thinking about how many annoying bits in it there were and the more I think about it the less I like it. You're right, I certainly don't think I'll be reading that again.
jenks
thread death
Can't let that one slide.
The junk food analogy just does not hold water. You may not like them but they do have literary merit, they are all more tana merely fun reads - Jewish extermination in The Ukraine, post 9/11 trauma in apserger's child, the total decimation of one's family and how you might possibly cope for example are all interesting 'issues'.
And this notion that nothing is going on beneath the surface - just patently not true.
say you don't like them but be fair when you damn stuff
old goriot
Well-known member
Can't let that one slide.
The junk food analogy just does not hold water. You may not like them but they do have literary merit, they are all more tana merely fun reads - Jewish extermination in The Ukraine, post 9/11 trauma in apserger's child, the total decimation of one's family and how you might possibly cope for example are all interesting 'issues'.
And this notion that nothing is going on beneath the surface - just patently not true.
say you don't like them but be fair when you damn stuff
I don't think I was being overly harsh. I like junkfood. It's better than being the literary equivalent of gruel: Canadian Literature
The problem with Foer is that while he touches on all these BIG TRAGIC EVENTS, he never really does them justice. I really don't think the guy is a very deep thinker on a fundamental level. He's a joker and storyteller, but out of his league when it comes to family, culture and politics. He resorts either to hysterical realism ("sammie davis jr. jr.") or overt sentimentalism. I dunno, I find something mildly exploitative about that novel that makes me kind of uneasy. As one person who I think was reviewing the terrible movie they made out of it said "I like my road-trip comedies without a side of holocaust, thanks"
Last edited:
jenks
thread death
Seriously, though, how many books do we re-read?
It's a great pleasure of mine - tonight I'm sitting down to finish off The Duchess Of Malfi which i haven't read for twenty years.
How often do people re-read for pleasure, as opposed to work?
isnt everything pointless anyway? you enjoyed it, isnt that enough?
generally like what he does (publishing, compiling, editing, etc) and support the whole Mcsweeny's scene... but that novel is neither heartbreaking, staggering, or genius. but one thing for sure it is, is over rated.
in comparison David Foster Wallce in my opinion does circles around Edgars in terms of ambition, wit, vision, bad-boy extremism, show-off literary acrobatics, and just sheer insanity of the mind-fuck factor.
in comparison David Foster Wallce in my opinion does circles around Edgars in terms of ambition, wit, vision, bad-boy extremism, show-off literary acrobatics, and just sheer insanity of the mind-fuck factor.
Souns worth checking out. What would you recommend startnig with? Does anyone know of any writer's groups/ workshops in London?
jenks
thread death
Even though like Eggars, i must agree DFW is in a different league, although i've yet to pick up on Oblivon, i've read all of his other stuff and would willingly re-read pretty much all his work.
i started with the collosal Infinite Jest. just a crazy fucking book. funny as shit. as unfathomably strange as real life itself... DFW i think can be construed as a bit of a misanthrope because his clinical style is almost like Lucien Freud's treatment of the human body - cold, exact, leaving not a single unsightly blemish unexamined...
his short stories are fun too. i remember this one story in which he takes a mental patient and just takes about 30 pages to dissect her brain and its dizzying layers upon layers of inextricably complex and interrelated neurosis, delusions, irrational fears and insecurities... fascinating like pulling legs off ants when you were 5.
edit: i have to mention that the footnotes start growing immediately and half way through the foot-notes start completely taking over the story, and that the main text actually ends somewhere around page 20, and the footnotes continue for pages. niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.
Last edited:
IdleRich
IdleRich
True enough, I meant that more as an expression of how I felt rather than literally. Pretty much the only times I really re-read a book are if I'm stuck somewhere where I've read anything or else it's a real childhood favourite such as Three Men In a Boat which I must have read a million times.
old goriot
Well-known member
A lot of what I re-read consists of books I read as a kid or in high school that went right over my head at the time. I must have read Heart of Darkness by Conrad 4 or 5 times. The first time I read it I was 12 and really into Apocolypse Now. I don't think I understood 5% of it. I couldn't even figure out exactly what it was that Kurtz was doing at the end of the river.
Nostromo is another great one to re-read because of the sheer amount of historical metaphor and symbolism employed. I highly recommend reading it after taking a course on colonial Latin America. I view it as the eurocentric, realist companion to 100 Years of Solitude.
anyways to clarify my original point, I wasn't necessarily saying that you will always re-read a great book, just that they are always worth re-reading. On the other hand, there is a certain genre of contemporary novel that is very fun to read the first time, but due to the devices employed (absurd coincidences, narrative gimmicks (thesaurus based narration, characters that talk back to the narrator), ultra-cosmopolitanism) they lose almost all efficacy once the novelty has worn off. I think White Teeth was my first experience with this genre. Tellingly, Smith's favourite author is Vonnegut.
Nostromo is another great one to re-read because of the sheer amount of historical metaphor and symbolism employed. I highly recommend reading it after taking a course on colonial Latin America. I view it as the eurocentric, realist companion to 100 Years of Solitude.
anyways to clarify my original point, I wasn't necessarily saying that you will always re-read a great book, just that they are always worth re-reading. On the other hand, there is a certain genre of contemporary novel that is very fun to read the first time, but due to the devices employed (absurd coincidences, narrative gimmicks (thesaurus based narration, characters that talk back to the narrator), ultra-cosmopolitanism) they lose almost all efficacy once the novelty has worn off. I think White Teeth was my first experience with this genre. Tellingly, Smith's favourite author is Vonnegut.