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Loading... A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Vintage) (original 2000; edition 2001)by Dave Eggers
Work detailsA Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)
 usefuljack | May 17, 2013 |  This book was my first clear foray into the world of metafiction, and I was delighted by the pictures, footnotes, reflexivity. It's probably not cool to admit to liking this book - only cool to acknowledge that the 826 Valencia Drive thing is really making a difference in the lives of children. But I'm tired of cool. I liked this book. And Douglas Coupland, too. And also, Buffy. (  ) usefuljack | May 17, 2013 | I tried to like this book, really and truly I did. I thought it would be clever and unusual and brilliantly worded like a David Foster Wallace book can be. After all, I'd unfortunately paid good money for it. And it's not easy to be so critical about an autobiographical book in which the author's parents die and leave him raising his much younger brother - you really want to root for this book and the author behind it. But it's awful. It doesn't matter whether Eggers really believes he's clever or is merely posturing as such for a lark. I'm sorry to be harsh, but if Mr. Eggers is anything in person like he is on the page, people must flee the room when they see him moving their way at a cocktail party. I can't explain why I felt compelled to finish this dull and tedious book, other than I felt it simply *had* to get better at some point. It doesn't. Do yourself a HUGE favor: pass this one by. I wish Mr. Eggers and his family all the best, but a decent turn of phrase once in a while does not an author make. Don't believe anyone who would have you think that critics of this book simply don't 'get' it. In this case, there is no substance whatsoever and precious little in the smoke-and-mirrors department, either. If you're looking for clever and/or funny, you'd be better off with Richard Russo's fabulous "Straight Man", Tom Perrotta's "Little Children", Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love", John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy Of Dunces" or a thousand other books I could rattle off. Really, ANY book is better than AHWOSG. It's that bad. Sorry. :) (  ) MichelleMF | Apr 19, 2013 | very good! i know some people find dave eggers to be emblematic of a certain type of self-obsessed, hipster lit genre but i found this to be intelligent and true (not to mention funny and fun to read). (  ) julierh | Apr 7, 2013 | I really tried to finish this since I feel it's unfair to say it was horrible without reading the whole thing, but I just couldn't. Life is just too short. I was dreading it every time I picked it back up and finally read about 3/4 of it until I couldn't take it anymore. I was sure it was going to get better. It had to. It didn't. I really felt like this book was not only pointless, it was a con. There was no story and no talent for telling one. It was like be trapped at a party with someone who won't stop telling insanely boring stories about themselves, and can't even tell them well. There seems to be this idea (in books, movies, music, art) that you can just produce crap and it's OK, and witty, and clever, and somehow becomes good as long as you let everyone know you think it's crap too. I don't understand that line of thinking. bb ( ) bongo_x | Apr 6, 2013 |
 ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius'' is a book of finite jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly. Eggers's most powerful prose is often his most straightforward, relying on old-fashioned truth telling for its punch.  Dave Eggers's new book, ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' is part autobiography, part postmodern collage, a novelistic ''memoir-y kind of thing'' that tells the sad, awful, tragic story of how the author's mother and father died within weeks of each other and how he became a surrogate parent to his 8-year-old brother, and tells it with such style and hyperventilated, self-conscious energy, such coy, Lettermanesque shtick and such genuine, heartfelt emotion, that the story is at once funny, tender, annoying and, yes, heartbreaking -- an epic, in the end, not of woe, though there's plenty of that too, but an epic about family and how families fracture and fragment and somehow, through all the tumult and upset, manage to endure. Though the book is marred by its ending--an unsuccessful parody of teenage rage against the cruel world--it will still delight admirers of structural experimentation and Gen-Xers alike. Eggers delivers a worthwhile story told in perfect pitch to the material. Eggers' seemingly flippant, but piercingly observant style, allows hilarity to lead the way in a very personal and revealing recounting of the loss of his parents.
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But I'm tired of cool. I liked this book. And Douglas Coupland, too. And also, Buffy. (