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Title: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer ISBN: 0-86547-540-7 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 16 June, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (8 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A good, but not a great read
Comment: The title of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence is taken from something Lawrence wrote of his own author-inspired work: "Out of sheer rage I've begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid--queer stuff--but not bad." Just so, Dyer's book is not really about D.H. Lawrence--it is like one of "those wild books" Dyer describes "in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably"--though Lawrence's life and writing do provide the book with what framework it has.
In conversational prose that makes his meandering narrative a fast read, Dyer recounts his experiences while trying to write a serious book about Lawrence. We follow the author as he travels around the world visiting the places Lawrence lived--Sicily, England, New Mexico--and while he pores over Lawrence's preserved correspondence. In the process we learn a little about Lawrence--he paid his bills on time, he is unlikely to have been comfortable naked, he tended to be angry much of the time, he was handy around the house. Mostly we learn about Lawrence's characteristics because they are shared by Dyer, about whom we learn a great deal. (Dyer, too, pays his bills on time, though he is not handy around the house.)
Dyer's defining characteristic is what he describes as his "rheumatism of the will, this chronic inability to see anything through." It is the reason he cannot decide finally where in the world he wants to live (a trait he shares with Lawrence), why he therefore lives "perpetually on the brink of potential departure," not acquiring the "trappings of permanence"--because while he may detest his current living arrangements, he suspects that he would regret at once the decision to give up the sublet he now finds stultifying.
Dyer's paralyzing indecision likewise renders him unable to do the exercises that will repair his knee and save him from continual pain, unable to decide whether or not to pack a particular book in his luggage, unable to write the serious study of Lawrence he originally had in mind, unable to write the book he was postponing writing by beginning the book on Lawrence. It is a wonder, in the end, that Dyer manages to conduct his life at all.
Dyer is also, like Lawrence, an angry man. While Lawrence was allegedly "angry even in his sleep," Dyer describes himself, sometimes amusingly, as cursing and muttering under his breath throughout the day, raging over insignificant annoyances.
"A few days ago the local delicatessen had run out of the luxury doughnuts which I have for my elevenses and on which I depend utterly.... Right, I thought to myself, turning on my heel and walking out, grim-faced and tight-lipped, I will return later in the day and burn the place to the ground with all the staff in it--friendly, charming staff, incidentally, who have often let me owe them money--so that they could experience a fraction of the pain that I had suffered by not being able to have my morning doughnut."
Dyer complains in the book about a lot of things--Italians, children, parents of children, literary criticism. I thought him a bit obnoxious early on in my reading, when he faulted the Greek fellow he'd rented a moped from for refusing to return his deposit on the bike after he (Dyer) had totaled it (through his own fault). His attitude becomes somewhat more forgivable when you come to understand that he recognizes, at least sometimes, how inappropriate his anger is.
There were times that Dyer's writing annoyed me. Particularly in the beginning of the book, he tended to repeat himself. He may have done so in a conscious attempt to add to the informal feel of his prose, but if so I think he went too far. For example:
"The next morning I could not move. I had to be helped out of bed. I couldn't move."
On a number of occasions, too, I was left wondering whether he was getting sloppy with his writing or was achieving some poetic depth I couldn't appreciate:
"The puddles by the roadside offered no reflection: the water was too old for that, was no longer sensitive to light."
But there were also a number of things in Dyer's book that I quite liked. There was the occasional simple, lovely sentence: "Not a great choice [of restaurants] from my point of view since sea-food is vile filth which I will eat under no circumstances." The relationship between Dyer's acquaintances Ciccio and Renata, who phone one another compulsively throughout the day, was priceless. And perhaps my favorite part of the book--the only part I found downright funny--was Dyer's description of his mortifying experience giving a lecture about Lawrence in Denmark. Thoroughly unprepared for the talk and sick with a bad cold, Dyer tried to use his illness and an ill-timed nose bleed to, at the least, gain a measure of sympathy from the audience. Which he failed to do.
As a window into the personality of a writer--Dyer, of course, not Lawrence--Out of Sheer Rage makes good, if not great, reading.
Rating: 4
Summary: Frequently hilarious
Comment: I usually cringe at the thought of writers writing about how hard it is to write, but Dyer pulls it off with frequently hilarious results.
Quotes frequently help me to decide whether or not to read a book, so here's one of my favorites:
I asked why a red light on the dashboard was flashing.
'Is to tell me I am not wearing seat belt,' Ciccio said. An EU ruling meant that all new cars were fitted with this warning device. A stupid and dangerous idea, he thought. The flashing distracted and could make you crash. But there was someone he knew who going to disconnect the wires so that he could ride in comfort without his seat belt and without this flashing light. Wouldn't it be easier just to wear the seat belt? I asked, but that was beside the point. The point was that there was a way around this edict. Italians enjoy exercising their ingenuity to trivial ends. To use ingenuity for some loftier purpose is somehow to diminish it. The more pointless the end the more vividly the means of achieving it is displayed. The further south you travel, the more extreme this tendency becomes. The ingenuity of the romans, for example, is as nothing compared to that of the Neapolitans. Ciccio even knew someone who sold T-shirts with a diagonal black band printed across the chest so that the police would be deceived into thinking you were wearing your seat belt.
Dyer is at his best at moments like this. When he starts dishing out actual insights into literature, he can occasionally get pretentious and windy, and most of ideas seem ripped of other thinkers - Barthes, especially. Whining about how hard it is to write his book would be insufferable if Dyer didn't have a lovely comic touch, and wasn't such a good writer (I recommend his book on jazz highly). His digressions about Rilke, Camus, and Nietzsche were occasionally interesting, but more often seemed unnecessary and (as is perhaps inevitable in such a book) pretentious.
If the book was any longer, it wouldn't work; you can't sustain such an exercise for very long. But as it is, it's worth a lot of a laughs, a couple of insights, a wonderful portrait of the author and a passable portrait of D.H. Lawrence.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Pleasures of the Elusive: Out of Sheer Wonder
Comment: I suppose one could only write a really decent, insightfulreview of Geoff Dyers' genre-defying Out of Sheer Rage by followingthe same wonderfully tortuous path taken by the author himself:procrastinate, delay, evade and travel to the far-flung places as Mr. Dyer once did, while constantly examining and re-examining one's own unique array of neuroses. Perhaps, like Geoff Dyer, by failing to write a solid review, one succeeds by taking a circular route, never diving straight to the heart of the matter and recognizing the triumph inherent in such a futile enterprise. Having said all that, one must keep ones' day job after all and what follows will have to pass for a circular route. Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence is a book within a book about trying, failing and succeeding at writing a biography of D.H. Lawrence (in a roundabout way) while simultaneously (quite by accident) employing one's personal and literary failures to gain access to one's own true self. Dyer leads the reader on a dizzying ride, we travel along with him and his long-suffering, multilingual girlfriend Laura in an effort to gain inspiration by way of the ritual of movement and a sense of place. We visit Italy,(Taormina, Rome)New Mexico, (Taos) Mexico (Oaxaca) and Oxford, all places where Lawrence once worked and lived. Nothing tangible realized there except some brilliant discoveries about the author's interior life. Observations usually unearthed by quoting Lawrence himself; "Freedom is a gift inside one's soul, Lawrence declared, you can't have it if it isn't in you." Dyer observes in a moment of self-awareness; "A gift it may be but it is not there for the taking. To realize this capacity in yourself is a struggle." And a further quote from Lawrence about getting to the core of one's own capabilities (or lack thereof) "Let a man fall to the bottom of himself, let him get to the bottom so that we can see who he really is." Dyer pulls us back into the past, then headlong into the present with beautifully written observations about the self, coping with depression, Nietzsche and the vagaries of his relationship with his girlfriend, Laura; " For Laura it is always 'together forever', for me it is always more like 'together whenever." (For arts' sake ? the reader can only guess). On falling in and getting out of depression; "All I felt was: I am depressed. I am depressed. And then, this depression generated its own flicker of recovery. I became interested in depression." And some Nietzschean philosopy to ameliorate despair; "Nietzshe wrote that the thought of suicide had got him through many a bad night, and thinking of giving up was probably the one thing that's kept me going." And inevitably, insights on the uselessness of giving up, of recognizing that what makes life so unbearable is that those things which seem so unbearable are in fact bearable; " The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded in the rest of a normal lifetime. Killing yourself is not giving up, it's more like a catastrophic fast-forwarding." Out of Sheer Rage is an ultra-vivid mosaic whose parts can only be glimpsed whole from a distance; one could read, re-read and write endless reviews and still not quite grasp its' true essence on either an individual or general level (which may in fact be its' true essence). But a few stray thoughts may yet be relevant when considering Out of Sheer Rage; to paraphrase Dyer: "One is really one's true self when believing that one is not one's true self." And this final, uplifting endnote; "One way or another we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our ambitions. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence." Out of Sheer Rage is both a gift to the reader and a virus that needs to be spread; once read, it begs to be re-read and passed along to anyone with the ability for even momentary self-reflection. So please read this book, then give it to someone as a gift so that they too can spread what cannot or should not be cured. END
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Title: Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer ISBN: 0375422145 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Paris Trance: A Romance by Geoff Dyer ISBN: 0865476004 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (French Modernist Library) by Marcel Benabou, David Kornacker, Warren Motte ISBN: 080326139X Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer ISBN: 1842124501 Publisher: Phoenix Press, London WC2 Pub. Date: 31 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: But Beautiful : A Book about Jazz by Geoff Dyer ISBN: 0865475083 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 26 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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