Wendy LesserRecensioni
Autore di Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books
Recensioni
Why I read : the serious pleasure of books di Wendy Lesser
...The point of all this is that literature can never be *just* a trick. We need to feel that something more is at stake, that something is truly being created where nothing was before...It would be inaccurate to say that authoritarian works command while works with authority persuade, for even the word "persuasion" is too blinkered, too end-achieving, too personally manipulative to cover the methods employed by the most powerful literature. (But the words "method," "employ," and "power" are also suspect here. They are blunt instruments standing in for something that is far more delicate and in fact nearly indiscernible.) The author who possesses authority has no palpable designs on us: we barely exist for him, just as he barely exists for us...And yet at some point in the process of reading, if the work has authority enough, the self yields.
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this passage (in full, anyhow...go read the whole thing!) and this chapter explained a lot for me. I avoided reading _The Color Purple_ for, like, 20 years because of all the snarky (at best) criticism of Alice Walker's place in the new canon. I didn't feel like reading anything super-manipulative and/or just not that good, and I reallyreallyreally didn't want a reading experience that would make me side with the Bad Guys. so when I finally read the novel ( because one should), I was doubly resistant...and yet, it happened: Walker's writing established an aesthetic authority to which my stupid, scared self yielded entirely.
at the same time, Lesser's notion of authority seems to explain why Eugenides leaves me cold. when I read him, I can *feel* his end-achieving designs in a way that embarrasses me. like a "miss u" text from someone you just met: dude, is your nose running? like seeing somebody wearing a Nirvana t-shirt: do you even Pixies? thx for making *me* feel like a dick, you dick.
it isn't that I dislike perceiving an author's designs on me; I am definitely not so cool that I'm not flattered by the attention. but when the author who barely exists to my barely-existing reader is, say, a more artful McSweeney's type, then that discernible design-- however overt or even heavy-handed--is more like seeing somebody wearing Velvet Underground knee socks. like, ok, i'm looking at you, so good job, but now tell me more.
The second half of the book covers her trip to Scandinavia, to see the the countries and the cities for themselves, to see if her impressions based on the novels are accurate. She makes pilgrimages to sites from the novels, visits local art and history museums and festivals. For unclear reasons, she narrates this in the third person, as a nameless "she" and her traveling companion. Perhaps she is making herself a "character" in her own Scandi story? The trip to Ystad to Wallander territory is sad: the town has become a virtual Wallander theme park. Some of this is a bit overlong. The best parts are when she snags interviews with working police dtetectives in the towns she visits, who tend to be patient and generous with their time and attention. Some are themselves fans of the noir genre, some not so much. She asks how many murders there are in Oslo (a city of about 650,000) in a year - they tease her and ask her to guess. "Fifty? A hundred?" she hazards. They laugh. Twelve to fifteen. It's about that in Copenhagen, and maybe thirty or so in Stockholm. One detective pauses to think, and says he can't remember any serial killers in his city in his career. Rapists, yes, but not killers. She explores why the literature coming out of these mostly well-run, peaceful cities is depicted as so much gorier, twisted, and just so much MORE than it actually is.
The book concludes with an annotated bibliography of books and television series. She recommends some wholeheartedly, others with reservations, but gives the reader a nice selection of titles to try (we have two more TV series on our Netflix list now). If you're not already into this genre, it may or may not invite you in, but it's smart fun for us already in the fold.
juliestielstra.com
In fact, I didn't really even try to read it after the first 20 pages because it was so dull. The author may have wonderful insights but skimming through the chapters to find something engaging didn't turn up anything to spark interest. The prologue was a long, drawn out meandering with nothing to the point. Yawwwn. For a fine example of how to drive the reader crazy, look at the first two sentences of the final chapter (chapter heading, Inconclusions).
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kerryp | 3 altre recensioni | Jul 4, 2020 |
kerryp | 3 altre recensioni | Jul 4, 2020 | 
There are yards of filler: anecdotes about Ayn Rand, Chekhov, Zoschchenko and Vasily Grossman: not any of which proved directly pertinent. It could almost be a study of the Beethoven Quartet ensemble which performed the premieres of most of the works. If for nothing else, I listened again to all this haunting music. That is rewarding.
Jerome Robbins (1918–1998) was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz and grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, where his Russian-Jewish immigrant parents owned the Comfort Corset Company. Robbins, who was drawn to dance at a young age, resisted the idea of joining the family business. In 1936 he began working with Gluck Sandor, who ran a dance group and convinced him to change his name to Jerome Robbins. He went on to become a choreographer and director who worked in ballet, on Broadway, and in film. His stage productions include West Side Story, Peter Pan, and Fiddler on the Roof. In this deft biography, Wendy Lesser presents Jerome Robbins’s life through his major dances, providing a sympathetic, detailed portrait of her subject.
To Lesser, it isn't so much what we read as how we read. "Pleasure reading is a hungry activity: it gnaws and gulps at its object, as if desirous of swallowing the whole thing in one sitting," she says. "But we need to slow down, and at times even come to a deal stop, if we are to savor all the dimensions of a literary work."
The mystery, at least for me, is how Lesser can "slow down" and yet still read and then reread as many books as she does. And while she may read the occasional Asimov, most of her reading seems to be more of the difficulty level of James, Faulkner, Balzac and Dostoyevsky. What would be challenging, even intimidating reading to most of us, she treats as casual reading.
One of the many interesting thoughts Lesser offers is that there is no such thing as progress in literature. It's not like chemistry or engineering, which advances decade by decade. We may view contemporary literature as superior simply because it is easier to follow and more relevant to our lives today, but that doesn't make it better (or worse) literature. Lesser points out that one of the miracles of literature is that those reading it a century or more after it was written may find things in it the original readers did not. Books change as their readers change.
Like the literature she favors, Lesser's book can be challenging. So just slow down and savor it.
A lot of works of literary criticism, review, or appreciation strike me as annoyingly pretentious or snobby, as though they're written by people desperate to show off their own discerning tastes and erudition. Lesser, thankfully, is entirely free of this. She's smart, thoughtful, and reflective, and she enthusiastically owns her opinions about the books she discusses, but she never comes across as full of herself, or as if she's appointing herself the arbiter of literary taste. Quite the opposite, in fact, as she readily acknowledges that her readers will undoubtedly disagree with her on many points. Her writing is intelligent without ever being opaque or show-offy. And while she values quality writing, she is refreshingly free of snobbery, including the most annoying form of literary snobbery (at least to me), genre snobbery. She does mostly focus on literary fiction and books that are widely considered classics, but she actually takes a very broad view of what can be considered "literature," and she happily embraces the mystery and spy thriller genres, and even spends several surprising pages talking about Isaac Asimov.
I did find myself wishing her reading and mine overlapped a bit more, as a lot of the books she talks about are ones I'm not familiar with. In particular, she devotes a lot of words to Henry James and to 19th century Russian novels, neither of which I have read very widely. (In fact, I've read just enough Henry James to conclude that I don't get along with his prose style, which Lesser clearly adores.) But even when she's talking about books I'd never heard of, the things she has to say about them are so clearly expressed and so well-connected to the larger points she's making that I never felt confused or left out of the conversation. Instead, I felt a real connection with her, reader to reader, despite what very different readers we are. And I thoroughly enjoyed her sharing her thoughts as a reader with me.
Lesser gives several descriptions of what she intends to do in this book, such as examining the intersection of murder and art, and asking philosophical questions. It seems that she actually wants to indulge in discussing murders and executions (she sees executions as murder), referencing whatever materials interest her, whether literary, journalistic, non-fiction, movies, pictures, etc., to no clear end. She goes off on little tangents: the main thing that she tells us about Paul Theroux's Chicago Loop is that she likes his description of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. There's nothing wrong with that per se, if she can make it interesting enough to engage the reader's interest. Clearly, by my rating, she failed in my case, although it would be helpful if I was compiling a list of fiction I never wish to read or movies I never intend to see.
Interwoven with the blather are the events and issues involved in the execution of Richard Alton Harris at San Quentin prison, particularly the legal quest by a television station to broadcast the execution. If this had been the sole subject of the book, I would have found it vastly more interesting. Until the end, it took generally got lost in the literary review. By the time she really focused on it, I was just counting down the pages. The book had no effect on my opinion of capital punishment, having brought nothing new to the discussion. If you already agree with her, you may like it better.
The first thing that I dislike about her book is her use of the word "we." Whenever I see that, I want to as, "we who?" If you want to know what "we" think, you have to survey us in some fashion, and despite what she thinks, that can't be accomplished while sitting at a desk idiosyncratically reviewing cherry-picked sources. One also needs to establish that there is a "we" whose opinions are similar enough to generalize. And in a related issue, I detest being told what I think, as when Lesser keeps stating "our" reaction to something highly specific and personal. I don't care if other authors do that, I consider it illegitimate.
She actually states at one point that when she says "we," she means "I," so why doesn't she use "I" consistently? I suspect that she thinks that the use of "we" gives more authority and weight to her personal opinions, but she says that she means "I" to give herself an out when challenged.
She keeps trying to answer questions about "our fascination" with murder, whether "our" interest is with the detective, the victim or the murderer, and whether there are moral issues here. Again, this cannot be answered from her personal interests, nor as a generalization. I personally see no moral difference in taking an interest in murders and in anything else that goes on around us: politics, war, floods, famines, literature, opera, educational standards, etc. I would consider myself morally derelict to take no interest. I find it ridiculous to argue that people who write about true crime are in some way accessories to it. Her attempts to raise moral issues leaves me less challenged to think than inclined to suspect she is morally tone-deaf, or just lost in her own pretensions.
I think that her writing reaches her nadir when she giddily tries to find symbolism in a stock film showing the gas chamber in a California prison. She remarks that the guards, the keys, the walls all "suggest imprisonment." No, they are imprisonment, unless you agree with Richard Lovelace that "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage." The humorous writer Richard Armour had a funny scene in which Lovelace's fellow prisoners shake their heads sadly; they know what is keeping them there. I showed the section to a friend who was a presentencing investigator. I can't describe the look on her face, but when part of one's job is to be locked, alone, in a cell with a potentially violent client in order to have a private interview, these things are not nearly so amusing.
She goes on to find symbolism in the fact that the lock turns clock-wise, although she admits that most locks do, thus suggesting time running out in the life of the condemned. If it turned, counter-clock-wise, no doubt she would also find it symbolic, like a timer running down, and if it flipped down to lock it could be reminiscent of a guillotine or the drop in a hanging.
All in all, I found this too irritating to have an impact on my thinking.
This sounds like the type of book I should love and it ticked all the right boxes for what I look for in a book about books; eclectic taste, part memoir and offering some literary criticism. However I felt a huge disconnection with this book and I spend a lot of time just trying to pin-point what wasn’t working. Clearly Wendy Lesser is passionate about books and is well read, though I felt like that passion didn’t translation into her writing. This felt more like academic writing, so all emotion felt removed from Why I Read, but this is the type of book that needs that emotion and passion.
I enjoyed the fact that Wendy Lesser jumped from Henry James or Fyodor Dostoevsky, to Jim Thompson, Ross MacDonald, Patricia Highsmith and other crime novelists. It was fascinating to see crime novels used as examples in literary criticism, I was happy to see examples of science fiction, and fantasy also included rather than sticking to just literary fiction or classics. It is a real shame that the writing was so flat; the concepts and ideas were great and with some polishing this could have made for a wonderful book.
I am disappointed that this book never grabbed me and the writing held the book back. There are plenty of interesting ideas and literary criticism worth exploring but the dull nature really made that difficult. I sounds like Wendy Lesser is passionate about books and would have a lot ideas worth listening to if only that passion was visible in the writing.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/12/10/why-i-read-by-wendy-lesser/
According to the dust jacket, “Wendy Lesser is the founder of The Threepenny Review, [an outstanding literary magazine]. She is the author of eight previous books of nonfiction and one novel. She won a prize for Music for Silenced Voices: Shostokovich and His Fifteen Quartets. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, and my favorite The Times [London] Literary Supplement.
Lesser divides the book into convenient categories including, “Character and Plot,” “Novelty,” Authority,” “Grandeur and Intimacy,” and the intriguing “Inconclusions.” However my favorite proved to be the “Afterword: The Book as Physical Object.”
Her style is chatty and actually fun. She opens her prologue with, “It’s not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse that others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself in someone else’s words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations” (3). Although I never given it much thought, these are all reasons I read.
When I was about 6 or 7, I was already an avid reader. I wanted more of what my mother would share with me before I lay me down to sleep each night. One day, I asked my Dad where he learned all the things he did. Is one word answer, “Books” hooked me and raised me from avid to voracious.
When Lesser starts a new book, she tells us, “”I open the cover and sniff the pages before I even start to read. I always think the smell of that paper goes with its feel, the tangible sensation of a thick, textured, easily turnable page on which the embedded black print looks as if it could be felt with a fingertip, even when it can’t” (188).
She also brings the interesting idea spatial aspect of a printed book. She writes, “someone who remembers specific passages in the spatial way I do – as in ‘I think it was on the left-hand side of the page, not more than two or three pages before a chapter break” – becomes lost in the amorphous, ever-varying sea of the digital page” (189). She mentions the conveniences of tablets and e-readers.
When she finishes a book, she holds “the pleasant weight of the closed book for a moment in my hands, as if to bid its story a silent goodbye, and then I turned it over” (204).
Wendy Lesser and I are kindred spirits. We both have the same devotion to the printed page in all aspects: vision, touch, smell, and, of course memory. Get a copy of Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books and explore in detail your love of reading.
--Chiron, 6/16/14
1 SeriousGrace | 1 altra recensione | Oct 25, 2010 |
SeriousGrace | 1 altra recensione | Oct 25, 2010 | Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.