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One of the most mesmerizing memoirs of the literary season: a wrenching, hilarious, and stylistically groundbreaking story of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. "Well, this was when Bill was sighing a lot. He had decided that after our parents died he just didn't want any more fighting between what was left of us. He was twenty-four, Beth was twenty-three, I was twenty-one, Toph was eight, and all of us were so tired already, from that winter. So when something would come up, any little thing, some bill to pay or decision to make, he would just sigh, his eyes tired, his mouth in a sorry kind of smile. But Beth and I ... Jesus, we were fighting with everyone, anyone, each other, with strangers at bars, anywhere -- we were angry people wanting to exact revenge. We came to California and we wanted everything, would take what was ours, anything within reach. And I decided that little Toph and I, he with his backward hat and long hair, living together in our little house in Berkeley, would be world-destroyers. We inherited each other and, we felt, a responsibility to reinvent everything, to scoff and re-create and drive fast while singing loudly and pounding the windows. It was a hopeless sort of exhilaration, a kind of arrogance born of fatalism, I guess, of the feeling that if you could lose a couple of parents in a month, then basically anything could happen, at any time -- all bullets bear your name, all cars are there to crush you, any balcony could give way; more disaster seemed only logical. And then, as in Dorothy's dream, all these people I grew up with were there, too, some of them orphans also, most but not all of us believing that what we had been given was extraordinary, that it was time to tear or break down, ruin, remake, take and devour. This was San Francisco, you know, and everyone had some dumb idea -- I mean, wicca? -- and no one there would tell you yours was doomed. Thus the public nudity, and this ridiculous magazine, and the Real World tryout, all this need, most of it disguised by sneering, but all driven by a hyper-awareness of this window, I guess, a few years when your muscles are taut, coiled up and vibrating. But what to do with the energy? I mean, when we drive, Toph and I, and we drive past people, standing on top of all these hills, part of me wants to stop the car and turn up the radio and have us all dance in formation, and part of me wants to run them all over."--Excerpt from chapter 5.… (more)
User reviews
Probably the best passages of AHWOSG occur at the start when Eggers describes the condition of his mother prior to her death. Those first 45 pages are truly excellent.
The rest of the
With the position he's come to occupy in the literary world it is perhaps easy to look back on this work and read it as the "woe is me" tale of a smug know-it-all. However, I think Egger's heart shines through here, back when he was writing this at the turn of the millennium before any real success.
AHBOSG isn't an earth shattering book, but it's a good tale told very well and, I believe, an important product of its time.
Now I have read the piece of James Wood about 'hysterical realism'.
What do I make of this novel:
1. Some chapters are way too long. Tiresome are some gimmicks: (a) Eggers' supposed worrying about Toph's surely going to die while he is away (sentimental too, Eggers trying to win our sympathy) (b) other boring because repeated and extensively written down daydreaming of Eggers
2. Eggers is convincing in his evocation of the feeling that death is no fun at all. In particular: there is no convincing consolation. No story puts it all in place, reconciles you with human beings passing away and then they're gone.
3. It's far too long and the adventures in real time (MIght-magazine) are not that interesting, which is saying the same thing twice.
I don't understand why David Foster Wallace called this "a ruthless book" (I have only read the translation of his quote on the cover). The novel is too sloppy to be called 'urgent'.
Water the Flowers!
I had heard about this memoir when it first came out and had it on my TBR ever since. I was intrigued by a book written by a young man who took on the responsibility for raising his much younger brother after both their parents died within a few
It’s clear that Eggers is intelligent. Obviously the circumstances that resulted in his guardianship of his baby brother were tragic, and every older sibling’s nightmare. I should have read the reviews by Goodreads members before I decided to finally read / listen to the book.
I found Eggers self-absorbed, immature, irresponsible and totally lacking in any insight. I really pity his little brother who might have been better off raised by wolves.
The most entertaining part of the book is the forward/preface/acknowledgments/copyright notice … which on the audiobook are read at the very end. Had this come first, I might have gone into the book expecting something more on the lines of satire, and (while satire is not my favorite genre) had different expectations and a different take on the work. But I went into it expecting a memoir of a tragic and difficult time in a young man’s life, and some reflection / insight / growth in character as a result. Too bad for me. Well, the preface,etc gets him one star.
Dion Graham does a reasonably good job reading the audiobook. Not his fault that the F bomb is used so often or that the writer gives us a manic narrative. (Not helped by my decision to listen at double speed to get through the 13 hours faster.)
This is a memoir. Eggers explains that he wouldn’t really call A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS a true story because he made up the dialog. And sometimes that dialog is obviously his invention, such as when a 9-year-old boy talks with the maturity of a 30-year-old man or when he begins with his MTV interview that turns into something else. I sometimes had to re-read to understand what he was doing.
Before the beginning of A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS Eggers notes all the parts you can safely skip. But that made me want to read them all the more, and I didn’t skip anything. I admit, though, after 100 or so pages his style sometimes aggravated me, his constant repetition, so I did skim some paragraphs. Even though I could tell that those paragraphs represented his private thought processes, I sometimes found them disjointed and monotonous.
Most reviews of this book concentrate on only part of the story, he and his little brother. Yes, Eggers raises his much younger brother, Toph, after their parents died. And, of course, Toph is a big part of the story, occupying Eggers' thoughts most of the time.
But he also emphasizes all the energy he simultaneously expends on a startup magazine. Poor Eggers is always exhausted.
Also running throughout his story are his remembrances of his mother, beginning near her end. Yet he doesn't have much to say about his father, apparently an alcoholic.
Eggers' memoir has three main subjects, not just one. Probably most readers find his relationship with Toph to be the most touching.