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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Being crazy was the conclusion of the joke Humboldt tried to make out of his great disappointment. He was so intensely disap-pointed. All a man of that sort really asks for is a chance to work his heart out at some high work. People like Humboldt- they express a sense of life, they declare the feelings of their times or they discover meanings or find out the truths of nature, using the opportunities their time offers. When those opportunities are great, then there's love and friendship between all who are in the same enter-prise. As you can see in Haydn's praise for Mozart. When the opportunities are smaller, there's spite and rage, insan-ity. I've been attached to Humboldt for nearly forty years.
I's been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry.
-the joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry.
You know? There's the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It's become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt's heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive.
That--it's perfectly plain, now can't be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us."
I's been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry.
-the joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry.
You know? There's the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It's become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt's heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive.
That--it's perfectly plain, now can't be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us."
challenging
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Every piece of writing is an argument. There would be no other reason for humans to unnaturally contort their bodies and screw up their eyes and exacerbate the results by remaining as such for long periods of time on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. The argument consists, at its most basic, of persuading the reader to venture on till the final page is turned, direct results of such seen in the ten or fifty or however many pages some people grant a book as a litmus test of whether or not completion is worth the effort. That's all fine and well if you're a casual reader of casual works and intend to speak on them on a casual basis, but if you insist on a. involving books in your career, b. reading what the career considers to be its giants, and c. evaluating as seriously as possible giants and non-giants alike, you're not going to hone your professional skills by making of habit of flaking. All this is made worse if you choose to go against the grain set by various pasty fanboys, so you might as well walk the walk if you want to talk the talk.
I'm usually pretty good about excising works that I know are going to do me no good before I make the mistake of taking them up. However, my fond memories of 'Augie March', plus Nobel Prize for Lit (in hopes of it not being as much of a disaster as BD), plus Jewishness (especially in these Nazi-enabling days), plus hearsay of respectful treatment of mental illness meant I picked this up, knowing better all the while. True to form, I found constant mewling and puking attempts at the universal that denied the universal to everyone but the white/white-passing and the male, littering the landscape with Negroes, r*dskins, broads, and cunts in an ahistorical mass that sought to comment on capitalism without acknowledging its inherent antiblack sadism and ventured to speak of all human souls without granting more than 9% of the world's populations the benefit of the doubt of having one. Best of all came the repeated assertions of how nice the main character is, how trusting despite knowing better, how important to the broader scope of humanity through the power of their all-seeking intellect, all the while commenting on not liking one daughter as much due to her lack of fuckability and waltzing all around the magical world of the settler state. And then the incessant name drops of the same 15-20 types, featuring Proust (queer as fuck but no mention of that of course), Whitman (also queer as fuck and inspired by the Upanishads rather than simply springing out of the white supremacist nowhere of the US), Chaucer (or the Merchant's Tale at any rate, what with the constant ragging on May/December marriages. If the Wife of Bath or at least the Clerk were read, they didn't make a much needed impression), and co. making for a suffocatingly glib parsing of the greats of the arts. I don't know how white men function, but this circular reasoning sure explains the tantrums they throw whenever a glimpse of reality shines a light through.
Long ago, a number of white/white-passing men (before the definition of white was invented, mind you) were able to laze around and, every so often, minusculy proportionate to their general population, contribute and/or pass off as unique contribution to the wider spectrum of knowledge of science or literature or whatever, all due to their involvement in colonialism or slavery or violation of human labor laws or some other artificially induced scarcity that enables a CEO to earn in an hour what a family of four sustains itself with in a year. A number of white/white passing men attempt to live this lifestyle without acknowledging the requisite genocides necessary for such, and as a result become frustrated when their much publicly bemoaned and privately masturbated to capitalism fails to go on its hind legs and beg upon witnessing their prowess at reciting Shakespeare and chasing the children of their former lovers. It gives me nothing to watch such echo chambered violators squirm, with their attempts to choke their girlfriends and run over their wives glossed over as the women really should have known better to have provoked such behavior. The only reason these women stuck around was cause they were surviving capitalism as best was available to the average white woman of 1970's USA, and if the main character would rather commune with the dead than incorporate that into his meanderings on materialism, Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram have nothing on that level of bad faith.
P.S. If you take this review personally enough to think it an attack on you and respond accordingly, go blow $50 and buy yourself some self-awareness.
I'm usually pretty good about excising works that I know are going to do me no good before I make the mistake of taking them up. However, my fond memories of 'Augie March', plus Nobel Prize for Lit (in hopes of it not being as much of a disaster as BD), plus Jewishness (especially in these Nazi-enabling days), plus hearsay of respectful treatment of mental illness meant I picked this up, knowing better all the while. True to form, I found constant mewling and puking attempts at the universal that denied the universal to everyone but the white/white-passing and the male, littering the landscape with Negroes, r*dskins, broads, and cunts in an ahistorical mass that sought to comment on capitalism without acknowledging its inherent antiblack sadism and ventured to speak of all human souls without granting more than 9% of the world's populations the benefit of the doubt of having one. Best of all came the repeated assertions of how nice the main character is, how trusting despite knowing better, how important to the broader scope of humanity through the power of their all-seeking intellect, all the while commenting on not liking one daughter as much due to her lack of fuckability and waltzing all around the magical world of the settler state. And then the incessant name drops of the same 15-20 types, featuring Proust (queer as fuck but no mention of that of course), Whitman (also queer as fuck and inspired by the Upanishads rather than simply springing out of the white supremacist nowhere of the US), Chaucer (or the Merchant's Tale at any rate, what with the constant ragging on May/December marriages. If the Wife of Bath or at least the Clerk were read, they didn't make a much needed impression), and co. making for a suffocatingly glib parsing of the greats of the arts. I don't know how white men function, but this circular reasoning sure explains the tantrums they throw whenever a glimpse of reality shines a light through.
Long ago, a number of white/white-passing men (before the definition of white was invented, mind you) were able to laze around and, every so often, minusculy proportionate to their general population, contribute and/or pass off as unique contribution to the wider spectrum of knowledge of science or literature or whatever, all due to their involvement in colonialism or slavery or violation of human labor laws or some other artificially induced scarcity that enables a CEO to earn in an hour what a family of four sustains itself with in a year. A number of white/white passing men attempt to live this lifestyle without acknowledging the requisite genocides necessary for such, and as a result become frustrated when their much publicly bemoaned and privately masturbated to capitalism fails to go on its hind legs and beg upon witnessing their prowess at reciting Shakespeare and chasing the children of their former lovers. It gives me nothing to watch such echo chambered violators squirm, with their attempts to choke their girlfriends and run over their wives glossed over as the women really should have known better to have provoked such behavior. The only reason these women stuck around was cause they were surviving capitalism as best was available to the average white woman of 1970's USA, and if the main character would rather commune with the dead than incorporate that into his meanderings on materialism, Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram have nothing on that level of bad faith.
P.S. If you take this review personally enough to think it an attack on you and respond accordingly, go blow $50 and buy yourself some self-awareness.
"But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system" (118).
challenging
funny
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
While certainly not for everyone, this novel offers an incredibly candid view of the challenges of friendship with a mentally ill genius. While our narrator is not particularly sympathetic, the fascination of the novel is watching it shift from a series if whirlpool musings into almost a plot the connects his obsession with boredom and meaning into a late_life direction.
Author comes across as a pretentious dick. I fought to get in as far as I did and realized that I didn't want to read almost 500 pages of misogynistic, self important masturbation. Hard pass, pun absolutely intended.