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Loading... A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Geniusby Dave Eggers
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I really just want to punch this asshole and tell him to get a grip, blow his nose and move on. Everyone's story is sad, everyone dies eventually and that the more people you know, the more dead people you know...We are a lot alike. I'm going to go drink.... (  ) spywall | Nov 14, 2009 |  A creatively-written memoir of two brothers on the road. Full of humor and sensitivity. (  ) checkadawson | Nov 2, 2009 | The title is a tad misleading; it's not all that heartbreaking and the genius is not especially staggering. Still, I would be willing to classify this memoir as one of the foremost texts on the Generation X mentality. Eggers recounts his life from the sudden death of his parents through his first few years as guardian of his younger brother, living in San Francisco, and starting Might Magazine. The writing style is self-conscious, obsessive, neurotic, and prone to lengthy tangents. The naked honesty of it all draws you in, keeps you reading. I'm not sure the rambling style would work as well in fiction, but as a memoir it's quite engrossing. Definitely recommended, especially to those who came of age in the 1990s. ( ) melydia | Oct 28, 2009 | When a friend first mentioned the title of this book to me, I thought she was just spouting hyperbole and I had to ask her what the book was actually called. I fell in love with the title and so was somewhat fearful, of course, about whether it could possibly live up to its name. Although I can easily see how this book might alienate some or how you could simply see it as fairly entertaining but not really all that, this is exactly the kind of self-conscious metafictional writing that makes me clap my hands with (possibly quite self-satisfied) glee and, in this particular case, laugh heartily. I wonder why I never encountered this book earlier but am fairly certain that if I had tried to read this when it came out, it would have cut too close to home on several fronts (or it could have been good for me - buggered if we'll ever know). (  ) LadyHax | Oct 26, 2009 | A lot of people hate on Eggers but I think this is a great story about how to raise children, how to survive on your own, etc... told with humor and insight. The postmodern tricks of the book are fun too. (  ) phette23 | Oct 19, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0375725784, Paperback)Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:").But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.) The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting. All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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