I've had a lifelong habit of falling in love with writers and then reading everything they've written that I can find as quickly as I can. Decades agoI've had a lifelong habit of falling in love with writers and then reading everything they've written that I can find as quickly as I can. Decades ago I did this with Philip K. Dick, among others. At that time - the early 1970's - it was no small feat to find his books. Most were not only out of print but incredibly scarce as well. I was working in bookstores during those years and even from that vantage point coming across any one of his books, especially an obscure one like 'Galactic Pot Healer', was a glorious day. It was far easier to read everything by Hemingway or Stendhal or Dostoevsky or many other of my youthful heroes, but I was a bigger fan of PKD than anyone else (until I came across Jorge Luis Borges, and then all bets were off).
This kind of fandom doesn't strike me very often anymore. I'm too old and have read too much. I've had too many heroes and have developed a terrible case of impossibly high standards. The few who've broached these barriers in the past decade are a short list including Cesar Aira and Jose Saramago, and then it was a long dry spell until this year when I somehow came across Emmanuel Carrère . In the past few months, as is my curse, I have read everything he's published (in English that is). I was holding out on this book because of the collision of two worlds - a literary hero now smashing directly into a literary hero then and I have to say, it was a bit rough on me! I love Carrère's clarity, his generosity, his way of making you believe every word (in a way that reminds me so much of Roberto Bolaño). In this case, many of those truths are hard to hear. I've long known of Dick's atrocious history with women, of his terrible misadventures with amphetamines, with his paranoia and delusions in the final years of his life. I hated Valis and Radio Free Albemuth when they first came out, and long felt sorry for the guy. How sad the brilliant mind of Do Androids Dream and Palmer Eldritch deteriorated so poorly in the end. Carrère's book makes you see it all and feel it all. It's a genuinely true story. Sad, but true....more
I'm a big fan so hey I loved it but my very favorite part was the Afterword by God. very funny.I'm a big fan so hey I loved it but my very favorite part was the Afterword by God. very funny....more
I enjoyed the television series, but found the book to be much more appealing. While the TV show was intense and melodramatic the book reveals the truI enjoyed the television series, but found the book to be much more appealing. While the TV show was intense and melodramatic the book reveals the truth to be far more interesting than fiction. The Piper Kerman of the book is a truer character than the TV version. She is more empathetic, compassionate and insightful, while never preachy, condescending or shallow. The show was entertainment. The book is revelation....more
While a bit overwrought at times (especially in regards to his interpretations of her work), still I learned a lot about the life of this great writerWhile a bit overwrought at times (especially in regards to his interpretations of her work), still I learned a lot about the life of this great writer, whose work I've been enjoying for a long time now. Her 'Hour of the Star' is in my all-time top five list both for books and films.
I like a biography that tells you interesting things about the author's life and surroundings, but I could do without any of the near-to-the-wildly-ridiculous Freudian interpretations of their work. Moser tries hard to link every single protagonist to Lispector's childhood grief about her mother's early death. He also loads us down with Lispector's alleged lifelong quest for God, which really seems like something that didn't actually happen. She seems to have been an atheist Jew who equated God with Nature or The Way Things Are and didn't bother so much about it. If anything, her lifelong quest for understanding was towards the heart of humanity and the nature of people. The Hour of the Star is as close as anything I've read to capturing the simultaneous greatness and smallness of the human condition.
Her parents' ordeals as Jews from Ukraine during the early part of the 20th century, then as poor exiles in Northeast Brazil is presented well, as are certain aspects of Lispector's personality. The analyses of her books is surprisingly tedious and shallow given that the biographer is one of her English translators. You get very little sense of the very things that makes her writing special, those sharp shards of insight and revelation she flings about so casually, the sheer shimmering of her prose, or the odd and unique perspectives she offers. Instead he paddles his canoe down psychological backwaters that serves no purpose either biographically or in terms of literature, and repeats the same quotes over and over again, diminishing both his own work, and that of his subject...more
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