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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
Fascinating story about the Collyer brothers, who I'd never heard of before reading this book.
Where is my brother, my keeper?
the writing of e.l. doctorow has always the depth of wells and bears the cadences of those depths. he brings into his prose the bitterness of philosophy and of poetry. in his latest novel, doctorow explores the bitterness of history in its most concentrated form imaginable.
homer and langley has the density of the lives of its two main characters, the infamous collyer brothers (after whom, so i understand, an entire syndrome is named, a syndrome now commonly referred to as ocd). instead of seeing this collector's tendency as a debilitating illness, doctorow has the intellectual generosity to see it as a platonic expression. when langley brings home first one, then eight typewriters of various make and model, the narrator, homer--the chronicler, the sensitive epic voice--, understands his brother to be searching for the ultimate expression of the form 'typewriter'. even in langley's relentless collection of daily newspapers, a particularly poignant project in our current climate of the gradual extinction of print journalism, lurks a platonic undertaking, the goal being the creation of a single edition newspaper that will describe with exquisite accuracy a litany of events that have always happened and will always happen with only minor, and therefore unnecessarily heeded, variation (one war replacing the last, one natural disaster scarring over the ruins of a previous catastrophe, one political scandal eclipsing the next in so many repetitions of irrelevant detail).
while one brother is busy reducing the world into a more or less neat set of essentials (how marvelous that the byproduct of such a reduction should be untold tons of impedimenta), the other is busy elaborating it with the subtle lusts of his muddy human heart.
God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And thought the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
#13
w.h. auden
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing.
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face.
That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
by pot-holed becks
a bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new men making another love.
Save him from hostile capture,
From sudden tiger's spring at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.
Introducing Alvaro de Campos
by Fernando de Pessoa
Yes, I am I, I myself, just what I turned out to be after all
A sort of accessory or leftover,
The foggy suburbs of my sincere emotion,
It's me here inside of me, it's me.
What I was, what I wasn't--that's all me,
What I wanted, what I didn't, all of that gets to be me,
What I loved, what I stopped loving--it's all become the same sad
yearning in me.
And at the same time, the yearning, a bit inconsequential,
Like a dream made of mixed realities,
Of facing myself left behind on a seat in a trolley,
To be accidentally met by someone who'd sit down on top of me.
* * * *
I'm me, and what the hell can I do about it!...
* * * *
I who am, in the end, a continual dialogue,
A loud incomprehensible voice from the tower in the depths of the
night
When the untouched bells sound indistinctly
With the pain of knowing there's life to live tomorrow.
* * * *
I, the solemn investigator of useless things...
the writing of e.l. doctorow has always the depth of wells and bears the cadences of those depths. he brings into his prose the bitterness of philosophy and of poetry. in his latest novel, doctorow explores the bitterness of history in its most concentrated form imaginable.
homer and langley has the density of the lives of its two main characters, the infamous collyer brothers (after whom, so i understand, an entire syndrome is named, a syndrome now commonly referred to as ocd). instead of seeing this collector's tendency as a debilitating illness, doctorow has the intellectual generosity to see it as a platonic expression. when langley brings home first one, then eight typewriters of various make and model, the narrator, homer--the chronicler, the sensitive epic voice--, understands his brother to be searching for the ultimate expression of the form 'typewriter'. even in langley's relentless collection of daily newspapers, a particularly poignant project in our current climate of the gradual extinction of print journalism, lurks a platonic undertaking, the goal being the creation of a single edition newspaper that will describe with exquisite accuracy a litany of events that have always happened and will always happen with only minor, and therefore unnecessarily heeded, variation (one war replacing the last, one natural disaster scarring over the ruins of a previous catastrophe, one political scandal eclipsing the next in so many repetitions of irrelevant detail).
while one brother is busy reducing the world into a more or less neat set of essentials (how marvelous that the byproduct of such a reduction should be untold tons of impedimenta), the other is busy elaborating it with the subtle lusts of his muddy human heart.
God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And thought the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
#13
w.h. auden
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing.
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face.
That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
by pot-holed becks
a bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new men making another love.
Save him from hostile capture,
From sudden tiger's spring at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.
Introducing Alvaro de Campos
by Fernando de Pessoa
Yes, I am I, I myself, just what I turned out to be after all
A sort of accessory or leftover,
The foggy suburbs of my sincere emotion,
It's me here inside of me, it's me.
What I was, what I wasn't--that's all me,
What I wanted, what I didn't, all of that gets to be me,
What I loved, what I stopped loving--it's all become the same sad
yearning in me.
And at the same time, the yearning, a bit inconsequential,
Like a dream made of mixed realities,
Of facing myself left behind on a seat in a trolley,
To be accidentally met by someone who'd sit down on top of me.
* * * *
I'm me, and what the hell can I do about it!...
* * * *
I who am, in the end, a continual dialogue,
A loud incomprehensible voice from the tower in the depths of the
night
When the untouched bells sound indistinctly
With the pain of knowing there's life to live tomorrow.
* * * *
I, the solemn investigator of useless things...
OK, not as good of a story as I expected. The writing is wonderfully crafted, but the story was not - way too many liberties with history.
The foundation of this story is based on a true story: two brothers growing up in a New York mansion in the early 1900s eventually become hermits, hoarding over 100 tons of material in their family home. E.L. Doctorow’s magic is in imagining the circumstances that might have led to this tragic ending and creating two amazing characters in the brothers. His writing is so sharp, so stylish, often so subversively funny.
I can't finish it, but I have made it halfway through. I don't like any of the characters, and there appears to be no plot. Thus, it is officially Abandoned.
A quick read, interesting story based on real life story of the Collyer brothers, though with major liberties taken on historical details. Interesting curiousity of a story, and a nice overview of a century in American life.
-Am I your shadow?
-No, you're my brother.
Highly fictionalized and sympathetic story of notorious New York hoarders, the Collyer Brothers. Well-written with a haunting ending.
-No, you're my brother.
Highly fictionalized and sympathetic story of notorious New York hoarders, the Collyer Brothers. Well-written with a haunting ending.
Doctorow has imagined the lives, thoughts and motivations behind the real figures of Homer and Langley Collyer, elderly brothers whose compulsive hoarding made national news when the brothers were found dead, one crushed by the horrendous accumulation of newspapers and debris in their New York City home, the other starved to death. Told completely from Homer’s point of view, who has been blind since childhood, we learn about the brothers’ lives and how they coped with their emotional and physical burdens, while also experiencing the historical progress of New York City through the early 1900s to the present.
I found Doctorow’s mastery of the rhythm and flow of Homer’s thoughts and observations astonishing. With a subtly comic thread running through all of Homer’s narration of his life and events, Doctorow’s reveals his “love” of the character of Homer, a voice that a reader can care about.
While the story left me feeling sad about the awful result of the brothers’ isolation, I also think I’ve developed my sense of empathy a little through Homer's insights, an awareness that everyone, even strangers, have an inner life that I can never know.
I gave the book 3 stars because I didn't feel Doctorow paid as much attention to developing the other characters in the book as he did to Homer. As the story progressed into the 1960s and 70s, I also felt my interest lagging and I was less inclined to believe the storyline.
This was my first introduction to Doctorow, although his name was very familiar to me. I think I will continue to read his books and see if his sense of language and style is even more apparent and enjoyable.
I found Doctorow’s mastery of the rhythm and flow of Homer’s thoughts and observations astonishing. With a subtly comic thread running through all of Homer’s narration of his life and events, Doctorow’s reveals his “love” of the character of Homer, a voice that a reader can care about.
While the story left me feeling sad about the awful result of the brothers’ isolation, I also think I’ve developed my sense of empathy a little through Homer's insights, an awareness that everyone, even strangers, have an inner life that I can never know.
I gave the book 3 stars because I didn't feel Doctorow paid as much attention to developing the other characters in the book as he did to Homer. As the story progressed into the 1960s and 70s, I also felt my interest lagging and I was less inclined to believe the storyline.
This was my first introduction to Doctorow, although his name was very familiar to me. I think I will continue to read his books and see if his sense of language and style is even more apparent and enjoyable.
I snagged this audiobook on Overdrive because someone had recommended Doctorow. I had no idea what the book was about when I began it, and only gradually did I realize that the novel is based on the Collyer Brothers! I have a morbid fascination with the Collyer brothers for some reason, which was what kept me reading the book; otherwise I would have thrown in the towel. The book is depressing (which is understandable given the subject material) and takes great (and unnecessary) liberties with the historical facts of the Collyer brothers' lives, but the story and characters themselves are not engaging. Both story and characters seem to be held at a distance from the reader, and even though the story is told from Homer's point of view, at no point did I feel like I really knew him. The characters' motivations are relatively unknown.
The kicker: I realized when I was almost finished with the book that CORY Doctorow, not E.L. Doctorow, was the author who had been recommended to me in the first place. *headdesk*
The kicker: I realized when I was almost finished with the book that CORY Doctorow, not E.L. Doctorow, was the author who had been recommended to me in the first place. *headdesk*
I didn't find Homer or Langley really likable. They seemed to just exist in a state of chaos. I understand how the downfall began with Langley coming home from the war. I felt sorrow for Homer, he really was at the mercy of Langley's fall into insanity. The end was particularly sad.