BUT. BUT. I am just blazing through my new and unread shelf! I am now on my third book post-Midnight's Children! I am incredible!
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering GeniusDave Eggers
Vintage 2001
ISBN 978-0375725784
Ummmm, right, so, generally I hate memoirs and also books dealing with the "family" theme... which memoirs usually are, because everyone has a family. Somewhat. More or less because they're boring, but also because they're self-involved and useless as a genre. I mean, obviously there are exceptions and that's probably unfair, but the idea of writing a memoir, if you are not fucking, like, Gandhi or someone, is preposterous. As if anyone cares.
(Inconsistently, I love blogs and the entire idea of blogging. I have absolutely no philosophical integrity.)
Time to be intelligent. Family: another theme I dislike. I dislike the language of "family values" because of its obvious ties to conservative politics, and as an extension of that, I find (crappy) literature's obsession with family in general to be an example of essentialism, and thus conservativism, that makes this kind of literature philosophically, if not offensive, at least irritating. Family-oriented literature asks "How do we deal with what we are given?" Whereas the question I am more interested in asking is "How do we change what we are given to make it better for everyone?"-- thus making the radical change necessary for any sort of social justice possible. Just because something is "natural" does not make it good. This is a very common intellectual error that is completely unfounded.
That said, Dave Eggers' Pulitzer-prize nominated A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is both a memoir, and about family, which I didn't realise when I bought it. It is about Dave's life as a twenty-something raising his kid brother after both parents die of cancer within months-- one month?-- of each other.
It kind of reminded me of one of my favourite favourite albums of all time, The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, in that it is about family tragedy and California. Those are really the only real reasons, but also because of the joy that gets mingled in with the anger and bitterness-- I would not have described The Mountain Goats as anything but completely tragic before I saw them perform in May, but John Darnielle's performance at the Garrick Centre was so joyful, he hardly ever stopped smiling, even during songs like Woke Up New, objectively the saddest song from the saddest album in the history of indie rock-- which is saying something. Likewise, Eggers' sense of humour, along with his textbook postmodern self-awareness, makes an Oprah's-book-club-type tragedy much more than it could be.
(Disclaimer, there are some very good books in Oprah's book club. But you know what I mean. Stuff your mom reads and cries a little bit while reading.)
Other thoughts. I don't know. I generally liked it; I found the self-aware, postmodern discussions on the necessary violence in turning life to art fairly interesting and not nearly as irritating as stuff like that can be. I mean, you can't do stuff like that without a certain air of clever-assery, but I think Eggers' very funny list of themes and metaphors preceding the actual "text" did a lot to help that-- i.e., if you've got to be self-aware, at least be self-deprecating about it. And they were infrequent enough so as to actually be interesting, allowing the story to function on its own without the added metafictional layer. Which I remember someone saying was the particular strength of The French Lieutenant's Woman-- that it functioned equally well as a nineteenth-century novel and a twentieth century novel. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius reads equally well as a memoir and a postmodern treatise on the act writing. Or something.
Anyway, clearly I don't have much to say on this one, and I was going to do some actual work while I was here this evening, in order to make my 45-minute bus ride not completely irrelevant.
Next: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
No comments:
Post a Comment