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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
I am currently halfway through this book and I can already tell you my final review: I will absolutely refuse to star this book. It is brilliant and I hate myself while reading it - because it is a lit-con.
The cover of my copy lured me with the names of Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Siegmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. What could seriously go wrong?
Well, as it turns out: a lot.
The back of the book tells you something about 100 essays, when in fact you are presented with a name on top of every one of these essays. They are in alphabetical order. And the short biographical note lures you into thinking that the following pages will be about that person.
You will also soon realize that the Nazi dictatorship left it's mark on about ever third page. And the names are a kind of uneven mix. (The chapter on Goebbels - while enlightning - shouldn't really fit with the other names. I don't think the chapter on Hitler was what it should have been. Nor does such a book really need THREE writers by the Name of Mann in there... (Needless to say that Erika Mann didn't make the cut...))
But it is somewhere around Lichtenberg that I realized: this isn't about the people mentioned at the start of a chapter. More often then not people are presented through the eyes of people who knew them. Half the time it is just about the author showing of how much he has read and how much he is able to re-summon at will. And the chapter on Lichtenberg wasn't on Lichtenberg. It was a musing on pornography that does fit in even less with the tone of the rest of the book.
It is then that you realize that this book has you fooled.
It is one mans take on the 20th century, the narrative he spun for himself to make sense of it all. It is no straight forward narrative. Half the time there is no real way of knowing beforehand what he will throw at you once you make it to the next name. So while you thought you knew what would be in store for you: you don't. And some of the things he throws at you while you feel falsely secure are interesting, some are macabre or rather gut-wrenching, and some of them are just needlessly wordy, making the same point again and again and again, or showing the author to be widely-read and wordy.
And I will be honest with you: having made it this far I am sure I would not buy it again, I would not even have started it if I had know what was in stock for me... and still a part of me insists that this book is a keeper - if for no other reason then the certainty that if I read it again in another 10 to 20 years I might take notice of way different things then I do now... that is, of cause, assuming that I would find the nerve to force myself through this again...
The cover of my copy lured me with the names of Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Siegmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. What could seriously go wrong?
Well, as it turns out: a lot.
The back of the book tells you something about 100 essays, when in fact you are presented with a name on top of every one of these essays. They are in alphabetical order. And the short biographical note lures you into thinking that the following pages will be about that person.
You will also soon realize that the Nazi dictatorship left it's mark on about ever third page. And the names are a kind of uneven mix. (The chapter on Goebbels - while enlightning - shouldn't really fit with the other names. I don't think the chapter on Hitler was what it should have been. Nor does such a book really need THREE writers by the Name of Mann in there... (Needless to say that Erika Mann didn't make the cut...))
But it is somewhere around Lichtenberg that I realized: this isn't about the people mentioned at the start of a chapter. More often then not people are presented through the eyes of people who knew them. Half the time it is just about the author showing of how much he has read and how much he is able to re-summon at will. And the chapter on Lichtenberg wasn't on Lichtenberg. It was a musing on pornography that does fit in even less with the tone of the rest of the book.
It is then that you realize that this book has you fooled.
It is one mans take on the 20th century, the narrative he spun for himself to make sense of it all. It is no straight forward narrative. Half the time there is no real way of knowing beforehand what he will throw at you once you make it to the next name. So while you thought you knew what would be in store for you: you don't. And some of the things he throws at you while you feel falsely secure are interesting, some are macabre or rather gut-wrenching, and some of them are just needlessly wordy, making the same point again and again and again, or showing the author to be widely-read and wordy.
And I will be honest with you: having made it this far I am sure I would not buy it again, I would not even have started it if I had know what was in stock for me... and still a part of me insists that this book is a keeper - if for no other reason then the certainty that if I read it again in another 10 to 20 years I might take notice of way different things then I do now... that is, of cause, assuming that I would find the nerve to force myself through this again...