Sven Birkerts

A series of autobiographical pieces by the master of reflection and slow time
Throughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country’s foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms.
In this deeply appealing and engaging show more collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his own life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. We read how the writer witnesses his son’s frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from many years ago, how finding a cigarette lighter or a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him—old friends, remembered places—are excavated, their layers exposed.
But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but deeply loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children’s independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader. show less

I can't even remember now how I came to find Sven Birkerts, but I think it was by way of a book jacket blurb he provided for some other writer. That's the kind of reader I am. I read the blurbs, the acknowledgements, all that stuff on the copyright page, etc.

Birkerts, like me, is obviously a book-person. His whole life is a testament to that. He decided early on, around age 14, that he wanted to write, but it took him another dozen or more years to finally find his niche as a writer. After show more struggling throughout high school and college at writing poetry and fiction - and coming up empty - he finally began to write about what he knew: other people's books. And since then, over the past few decades, he has become recognized as a preeminent literary critic and essayist. But even at that, hey, I'd never heard of the guy.

But in MY SKY BLUE TRADES he tells of his own life. It's certainly not a rags-to-riches sort of story, since he grew up in Bloomfield Hills (a wealthy Detroit suburb), son of Gunnar Birkerts, a successful and respected architect. What makes his life story unique and interesting is that his parents were both emigrants from Latvia, so he grew up bilingual and always feeling just a bit 'different.' There were generational-cultural clashes between Birkerts and his father, an ultra-practical and orderly man. His memories of his grandparents play a big role in his development too. He attended the private and exclusive Cranbrook School, and then went on to UM in Ann Arbor. But although Birkerts comes from an upper class background, his coming of age has an element of commonality. The music of the sixties, the constant trying to fit in, a few best friends, experimenting with drugs and drinking, crushes, etc. It's all in there. And then his strivings and disappointments at college, love affairs that didn't quite work out. But it was what he had to say about books and writers and his jobs at various bookstores in Ann Arbor and Boston (after college) that gave his story a kind of "special-ness" for book nerds like me. I was reminded of a favorite memoir from another equally famous critic and columnist - Michael Dirda's AN OPEN BOOK.

I must confess I didn't dog-ear a single page in this book, because every page was special. It was a story I wanted to go on and on. I'm not Latvian. My parents weren't immigrants. I didn't come from a wealthy family. So what was it about this book? BOOKS! That's what it was. There's such a rich love of books and writing displayed here. Well, Sven, me too. Thanks so much for sharing it all, for writing it all down. I loved it!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Wandering The Wilderness Until The Desert Blooms

This book by Sven Birkerts -- whose fine essays have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere -- may just serve to keep alive the fine art of literary criticism after the ravages of a post-modernism that has all but torn it apart. If this seems too harsh a verdict to render on the bleak outcomes to which elite intellectual efforts can all too easily lead, then please think again. Well before An Artificial show more Wilderness ever appeared, John Bayley had this to say in New York Review of Books way back in June 4, 1981. "The reality of the thing, the return of the thing. Structuralism and deconstruction . . . have banished physical realities from literature, replacing them with the abstract play of language, the game of the signifiers. They were on their way out anyway, they were leaving literature, and the critical process, as usual, found ways of explaining and rationalizing their departure, even of suggesting they had never been there."

Enter Sven Birkerts. He had been quietly "worrying the matter" of his voluminous readings as far back as his early days as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, when he stumbled into a second-hand bookstore as well as upon the life-lasting pursuit that later led him to the proliferating gleanings that comprise the bounty of this insightful book. But how to lay out the scatter of it all in "a single balanced entity," or better still, in some "more concrete narrative"? Avoiding the trap of trying to survey the entire span of a century, Birkerts wisely chose here instead to excavate the sites of some of its better-known prospectors in order to assay their findings -- thus dealing in substance instead of sweep. What he finds is high-grade ore. Since Birkerts has to fend off his share of sharpshooting detractors sniping at him from the hills', who take him to task for being much too fond of foreign writers over those from America's own shores, let us pick an American writer to enter as evidence and make our case. Birkerts, who clearly understands that it takes a soul to sense the sickness, lostness, or absence of another one, excavates Malcolm Lowry's overwhelming achievement Under the Volcano, rightly recognized the world over as a masterpiece in depicting nothing less than the ruin of a soul -- which in his own life, Lowry certainly lived out. No empty, arid, condescending, ivory-tower, vacuous, stuffy theorizing here. Every phrase is taut as a drawn bow string and terribly telling . . . Birkerts's no less than Lowry's. But don't take my word for it. Read this book and judge for yourself.

Because of how subtly his own mind works, Birkerts is also able to discern the subtleties working in the artful minds of those treated in his insightful essays. That, in its turn, is what can bring forth in even the most barren wilderness a bloom in the desert as rare as this. show less

The relationship between a book and it's reader is quite a personal matter. I wonder if authors consider that the book they write is not necessarily the one the reader reads. We all bring ourselves to the page. Birkerts' has two selves, that of the teen reader and that of the middle-aged man. He discusses them both in this collection of essays about The Catcher in the Rye, Pan, Women in Love, Madame Bovary, Humboldt's Gift, Lolita, The Moviegoer, the Good Soldier, The Ambassadors, To the show more Lighthouse, and The Beggar Maid. He piqued my curiosity so that I'm making my way through each one of these books myself, eager to have my own experience of them. That a writer makes you hungry for a book is a sign of success, I think. Highly recommended reading. show less