AAR: There's another factor, and I've whinged incoherently about this before, which is to do with 'serious' literary study being swallowed up wholesale in 'Cultural Studies' conventions with almost no personal touches. VIZ Brian Finney on Kazuo Ishiguro:
[snip]
To which the response will be yes, yes, aesthetics is constructed and subjective and has no place in a proper study ... but is it? Is it really? And even if it is, that many a book is more enjoyable to read than the Ishiguro seems a fact worthy of note, as well as whatever politics there might be in the thing. Or are our physical responses to stimuli better off ignored?
Some of these people might as well have not read the book. Ah, there's periphery in it! And that bit's carnivalesque. Oh good.
I'm certainly rambling, but am I wrong?
I agree with you completely. I'm reading for my Lit PhD exams right now, and most of my notes so far are centered around taking criticism back in the name of aesthetics. Ideological criticism is fine as long as it's grounded in discussing what aesthetic effect it accomplishes in a work. To my mind, the aesthetic is the absolute horizon against which all other criticism must be measured.
Janean Patience
So nobody here likes his writing? I thought the first half of A Staggering Work was pretty staggering, the obsessive focus on the minutae of one painful hospital day and that feeling of always being rushed to fit in normal life around momentous stuff like dying parents, writing birthday cards in a darkened waiting room with a borrowed pen, was incredibly adept. I empathised, which I think was the required reaction, and I wasn't manipulated which I think is what Eggers was trying to avoid. It was emotion at one remove and a constant sense that this is his tragedy, not yours, and his to do what he wants with. Then there's that abrupt shift in tone, an escape from the hospital and the deaths and the slow passage of time and everything that's framed the narrative so far to San Francisco and freedom, the freedom of the worst having happened. The book gets mired by its own versimilitude after a certain point, but I'm surprised if anyone got nothing from it, even if it's just the rhythm and flow of Eggers's prose.
And I really loved You Shall Know Our Velocity! though my partner hated it. It was judged by the standards of a memoir by most critics, because the previous work was autobiographical so this one must be, but it was funny, subtle, the characters were carefully built and real and once again the prose was great. Here's the opening passage that originally appeared on the cover:
Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago's North Side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake. I was inside, very warm, walking from door to door.
Nobody likes eyeblue? Or the cadences of that concluding line, walking from door to door?
I like his writing, but I admit it's not for everyone. With Heartbreaking Work, I think you're spot on about the first half. He even says as much in his prefatory Acknowledgments (something along the lines of "You can skip chapters 4, 5, and 6"). I think that acknowledgement pissed some people off, but I'm glad those chapters were in there. I enjoyed the whole book, despite some parts being better than others. Other than that, I've only read a few short stories, some of which I've liked a lot. |
