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Shuffle
Includes "Journal", "My Father", "To Feel These Things", "Literary Talk", "The Abandoned House", and "Sylvia"
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
First published January 1, 1990
78 people want to read
About the author
Leonard Michaels
48 books108 followersLeonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, and a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 12, 2011
Time Out of Mind got me to really love the Leonard Michaels style of journal entries, and Shuffle has a bunch more of that, which is great. These entries range from aphoristic little nuggets to surprisingly personal reflections. Besides that, Shuffle is a bit of a hodge podge. There are a couple of longer personal essays and an early taste of what would become his novel Sylvia. There are a few moments that you might call "navel gazing" but Michaels can get away with that--because he's freakin' Leonard Michaels!
August 29, 2024
“‘Hold me,’ she whispered, then slept, her body fused along my side, breathing as I breathed.
Ocean fell along the beach.
I heard the god of night heaving a great sheet and hauling it back, and then heaving it again, trying to make his bed.”
—
“In 1960, after two years of graduate school at Berke-ley, I returned to New York without a Ph.D. or any idea what I'd do, only a desire to write stories. I'd also been to graduate school at the University of Michigan, from 1953 to 1956, which came to five years of classes in literature, and I wasn't a scholar or a writer or anything but an overspecialized man, twenty-seven years old, who could give no better account of himself than to say ‘I love to read.’ […] In a vague and happy way, I felt humored by the world, and whatever my predicament, I wasn't yet damaged by judgment, though I inflicted it on myself every minute. I had nothing else to do.”
—
“She had sliced her wrists superficially. She'd done it once before we met and was good at it. There was a little bleeding. There'd be no scars. She began picking at the food. I felt relieved, hopeful. She liked gefilte fish. It pleased me to see her eat. […] It was delicious, nothing to fight about, but she ate sullenly, as if conceding that there might be a reason to live.”
—
“In someone else, I'd consider my inability to get out contemptible and stupid, but she touched levels of aesthetic and sentimental disease in me. I'd think Sylvia's hysteria meant something I couldn't understand because I wasn't a good enough person, whereas she was a precious mechanism in which exceedingly fine springs and wheels had been brutally mangled. Anyhow, I was locked into some idea like that.
I felt strong revulsion, but even as it became insufferable, it held me tighter. It would have been easy to leave her. Had it been difficult, I might have done it.”
—
“Naked in our drugged radio darkness, we turned to each other with a rush of gluey love and happiness. For months thereafter, we said affectionately, ‘You have missed the whole boat.’ Sylvia was sometimes high-spirited and funny, but it is easier to remember the bad times. They were more frequent and sensational; also less painful now than remembering what I loved.”
Ocean fell along the beach.
I heard the god of night heaving a great sheet and hauling it back, and then heaving it again, trying to make his bed.”
—
“In 1960, after two years of graduate school at Berke-ley, I returned to New York without a Ph.D. or any idea what I'd do, only a desire to write stories. I'd also been to graduate school at the University of Michigan, from 1953 to 1956, which came to five years of classes in literature, and I wasn't a scholar or a writer or anything but an overspecialized man, twenty-seven years old, who could give no better account of himself than to say ‘I love to read.’ […] In a vague and happy way, I felt humored by the world, and whatever my predicament, I wasn't yet damaged by judgment, though I inflicted it on myself every minute. I had nothing else to do.”
—
“She had sliced her wrists superficially. She'd done it once before we met and was good at it. There was a little bleeding. There'd be no scars. She began picking at the food. I felt relieved, hopeful. She liked gefilte fish. It pleased me to see her eat. […] It was delicious, nothing to fight about, but she ate sullenly, as if conceding that there might be a reason to live.”
—
“In someone else, I'd consider my inability to get out contemptible and stupid, but she touched levels of aesthetic and sentimental disease in me. I'd think Sylvia's hysteria meant something I couldn't understand because I wasn't a good enough person, whereas she was a precious mechanism in which exceedingly fine springs and wheels had been brutally mangled. Anyhow, I was locked into some idea like that.
I felt strong revulsion, but even as it became insufferable, it held me tighter. It would have been easy to leave her. Had it been difficult, I might have done it.”
—
“Naked in our drugged radio darkness, we turned to each other with a rush of gluey love and happiness. For months thereafter, we said affectionately, ‘You have missed the whole boat.’ Sylvia was sometimes high-spirited and funny, but it is easier to remember the bad times. They were more frequent and sensational; also less painful now than remembering what I loved.”
March 31, 2024
There are so many lines in this book that have just stuck. Heart-warming, heart-wrenching, amazingly in tune with reality then beautifully rendered to the reader.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews