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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. Attempts to be funny, and it is: at first. Eggers style gets old very quickly, the characters are an attempt at quirky and interesting characters but the end up being undeveloped, unrealistic and silly. I am aware that this is a true story but Eggers doesn't have enough of an understanding of people to make the characters come through. The guy has lived an interesting live but he comes across as silly, juvenile and pathetic. Nothing to get me to keep reading after the first hundred pages. There was no point during which I read this and saw myself. This is the kind of book where you come for the humour, but beyond that, there is nothing to continue reading for. (  )unlucky | Jun 16, 2009 |   In some ways, a bit of an editorial mess, but it is a wonderful, glorious mess that you wouldn't want any other way. Well, okay, there's this part in the middle about MTV that could go. But it's still great, and is the only book that can make me laugh out loud in public and not care that people are staring. The last paragraph is just pitch perfect. (  )amyrenee | May 18, 2009 | On the whole I enjoyed this clever memoir written by someone who is around the same age as my sons. The first half of the book was funny. I found the opening sections, acknowledgments, how-to-read, very clever and unique. However, things started to fall apart and get a bit self-indulgent in the middle. Toward the end things picked up again. On the whole I enjoyed the journey. (  )lucysmom | May 9, 2009 | Original. Funny. The Acknowledgments at the beginning was brilliant and I loved the book all the way through. Hilarious and touching as the main character searches for meaning and copes with life. With a book like this I feel like I can't even do it justice in describing it or extracting quotes; like "A Confederacy of Dunces" there is a lot of humor and I didn't try to represent it... "Oh, pshaw - does it even matter now? Hells no. You're here, you're in, we're havin' a party!" "The lattice is the connective tissue. The lattice is everyone else, the lattice is my people, collective youth, people like me, hearts ripe, brains aglow. The lattice is everyone I have ever known, mostly those my age or thereabouts - I know little else, know only six or seven people over forty, know nothing to say to them - but my people, we are still there, still able, if we start right now - I see us as one, as a vast matrix, an army, a whole, each one of us responsible to one another, because no one else is." "There is no sense to the Presidio, its areas of raw forest, unkempt baseball diamonds near million-dollar homes, but of course there is no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons. Why not pink, purple, rainbow, gold? What color for a biker bar on 16th, near the highway? Plum. Plum. ..." ( )gbill | May 2, 2009 | I actually tried to read this book three times. The preface was hilarious, engaging, witty... everything the book itself was not. I found the character that was meant to be the author to be the most shallow, egotistical individual I have ever had the misfortune to read about and the self-deprecating, droning writing style to be manipulative and pretentious beyond all reason. (  )marctic | May 2, 2009 | 0.074 seconds to build listing  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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