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Sto caricando le informazioni... Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (2004)di Jonathan Coe
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Coe writes enticingly, with the quiet fever of the bookish detective, but he treads softly. Not for him the hammy unveiling of a juicy revelation [...] not for him the putting together of two and two to make five. Instead, he uses all manner of means - tricks straight out of Johnson's top drawer - to ensure that we see his book for what it is: as merely one way of telling an impossible story. Premi e riconoscimentiMenzioni
The critically acclaimed biography of a man respected for his fierce commitment to truth and honesty, and his passionate belief in the avant-garde.In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known young novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde in both literature and film, he became famous -- not to say notorious -- both for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his idiosyncratic ways of putting them into practice. But in November 1973 Johnson's lifelong depression got the better of him, and he was found dead at his north London home. He had taken his own life at the age of forty. Jonathan Coe's biography is based upon unique access to the vast collection of papers Johnson left behind after his death, and upon dozens of interviews with those who knew him best. As unconventional in form as one of its subject's own novels, it paints a remarkable picture -- sometimes hilarious, often overwhelmingly sad -- of a tortured personality; a man whose writing tragically failed to keep at bay the demons that pursued him. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)809Literature By Topic History, description and criticism of more than two literaturesClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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Not so. Coe tells us he spent more than eight years, on and off, researching and writing this book, and he obviously had a hard time making his mind up about what conclusions — if any — could be drawn about Johnson's life. As a result, we get a book that, while it doesn't come in a box or have holes in the pages, is quite unusual in form by the standards of literary biography. Coe first takes us through Johnson's main works, the seven novels, and only then tackles the "life" part, following a roughly chronological sequence guided by 160 "fragments" from Johnson's writings (books, letters, rough notes, essays, application forms, etc.). He tries to make some kind of sense of how this combative, self-assured writer who always seemed to be quite certain that the peculiar theoretical path he was beating through the literary jungle was the only possible valid one, could end up messing up so many of the projects he worked on and antagonising so many of the people who could have been helping him.
Not straightforward, and Coe doesn't try to pretend that there are any sweeping generalisations to be made, but we do end up with some ideas that help us to understand Johnson a little bit better. Although it's not really clear by the end of the book whether Coe has really managed to convince himself that literary biography is a valid thing to do. He pats himself on the back a couple of times when he finds texts that Johnson has filed away noting that "this will go in me memoirs one day," but he has to step back and leave us with a bit of literary ambiguity when he comes to questions that only Johnson himself could have resolved for us, especially the big one of why he chose to end his life in November 1973.
A very interesting biography, and a book that raises quite a few questions about the way we evaluate literary success and standing, the ways writers are rewarded, and so on, that are obviously still worth thinking about now. A minor disappointment is that we don't get to learn much about Johnson's relationship with the person he regarded as his most important mentor, Samuel Beckett, presumably because Coe couldn't get permission to use their letters. But there is a lot about Johnson's other literary friendships, and a very entertaining selection of his angry letters — one of the best is addressed to a distinguished US publisher and opens with "You ignorant unliterary Americans make me puke." (Coe's Fragment 84, dated 28 June 1965). ( )