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How Literature Saved My Life
Blending confessional criticism and cultural autobiography, David Shields explores the power of literature to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. Evoking his deeply divided personality, his character flaws, his woes, his serious despair, he wants "literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this—which is what makes it essential." This is a captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original book about the essential acts of reading and writing.
222 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
83 people are currently reading
2995 people want to read
About the author
David Shields
74 books264 followersDavid Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Believer, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
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May 13, 2013
I'm trying to write an actual paper incorporating my complaints about this book. For now, here's a first draft of those complaints. This is absolutely not the place for such a piece, but I don't want to write another version of it specially for goodreads:
David Shields, Art and Life’s Big Problems
The misuse of words
I, and people like me, get more pleasure from learning a thing’s name than from learning about the thing itself. When my then girlfriend offered me a potato pancake, I wasn’t too impressed, even though she told me all the history behind it. When she called it a latke, on the other hand, I was thrilled. The same thing happened when I read, in my college’s listings, the course title ‘Literature and Phenomenology.’ I had no idea what the latter was, and it turns out I’m not interested in it, but the word, phenomenology, stunned me. The more useless and obscure the thing I’m learning about, the more this effect is heightened. Take the jargon of rhetoric: anacoluthon, antanaclasis, asyndeton. Soraismus. Captatio benevolentiae. Lovely.
I suspect that David Shields, the author of How Literature Saved My Life, is this kind, my kind, of person. Consider his claim that David Foster Wallace’s essayistic technique is an example of what Adorno calls immanence: a particular artistic or philosophic relation to society. Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture, to reflect back its ‘whatness,’ refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.
‘What Adorno calls immanence’ is like saying ‘this is what we here in Los Angeles call a hamburger.’ All philosophers mean by ‘immanent’ something like ‘does not exceed whatever it’s based in.’ Shields’ claim then develops into something nonsensical. Immanence is no more complicity than a hamburger is a laptop. Shock absorbers do not reflect. But these glorious words: immanence, complicity, refracted…
Shields also loves phrases. He uses Wittgenstein’s “the world is everything that is the case”—the idea that philosophy should be limited to the study of how logical propositions relate to each other—to mean something like ‘I can write however I want.’ Wittgenstein changed his mind, of course; his later project was to show his readers that the big philosophical problems are more or less made up by philosophers. There are no Big Problems, no ultimate solution to Life, only life, a bunch of overlapping concepts and the way we go on using them. Adorno went a little further, arguing that the big philosophical problems are just ways of (at best) ignoring actual problems or (at worst) contributing to them; the real problems, the hard problems, are historically specific injustices. They’re not part of some inescapable condition; they’re our fault.
Clearly, Shields finds how these philosophers write, rather than what they say, appealing: the glorious words. But he’s all about The Big Inescapable Problems, working in the traditions of
i) existentialism. HLSML is an impassioned cry for a literature that “foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.”
ii) pessimism. The best explanation for a phenomenon isn’t the simplest one, but rather the one with the most depressing implications: “Death is my copilot… love equals death, art equals death, life equals death… all literature and all philosophy have come from this [formula].”
iii) and, in terms of form, the fuckshitup manifesto. Shields demands books that are “ready to break the forms” of literature itself, doing whatever they can “to vanquish the numbness that is a result of… expectation.”
Shields says ‘all philosophy and literature come from the formula life = death’ because if he said the much more sensible and true ‘my literature and philosophy,’ his readers would be able to tell that he’s working within these narrow, conventional traditions. And copping to those traditions would clash with his individualistic, formally imaginative, fuckshitup thing.
This move, deducing, from ‘I feel sad,’ ‘The world is fucked,’ is characteristic of Shields’ book in general, e.g., “I feel so remote from things… we’re existentially alone on the planet”. The move is not unique to him, indeed, it’s essential to the traditions in which he’s working. To know the world, one need only look into oneself with sufficiently clear-eyes. That means seeing through things that we mere mortals take at face value, like morality and how much we enjoy ice-cream. Twentieth century thinkers in this tradition know that “cognitive science and DNA” are the ultimate explanations of The Human Condition (yes, this is completely at odds with actual existentialism). They know that you don’t really like ice-cream, that it’s just brain chemistry and the survival of the fattest. These (almost always) men know that the most recent ‘scientific’ knowledge is true, and that is no truth, except for moral relativism. We know that moral relativism and ‘science’ are true because there’s something depressing about them. Truth, you see, is not something which demands our rational assent. It’s something we feel. And it feels bad to me. Therefore, the world is fucked.
Literature, Shields suggests, should help us deal with this sadness by treating the existential loneliness that is tied up with it. When he reads, he wants “to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone—I’ve gotten to this other person.” He wants “loneliness-assuaging” literary works that ‘transfer consciousness’ from the author to the reader. He wants immediacy, a promise of unmediated reality, raw nerve endings, and naked feeling. He wants, as much as possible, to gain unfiltered access to other people’s pain.
Now it seems to me that if you want access to other consciousnesses, you should start by accepting that other consciousnesses have something to offer you. But Shields is uninterested in this, so he uses Wittgenstein’s and Adorno’s words, but not their meaning. As I read through HLSML, it became obvious that, far from wanting access to other consciousnesses, Shields wanted only the reflection, or possibly refraction, of his own.
What he does very well is present the contemporary middle aged intellectual: journalist parents, grew up post-hippie, studied semiotics at Brown, MFA at Iowa, taught writing, undergoes a crisis, demands both complete autonomy (I can use other people’s words however I like), and complete access to others (give me your raw nerve endings).
This strange conjunction of demands makes more sense when you consider that the men and women of Shields’ generation are the last for whom post-structuralism/semiotics was an unchallenged epochal event. Post-structuralism was very good at pointing out that some x, previously believed to be certain and unshakeable, was in fact not certain or unshakeable. The method, in general, was to take a (in the broad sense) text and show that the author was making certain assumptions. This undermined the text’s own claims, which is politically radical. That’s a great liberator if you’re in the grip of structuralism (wait, systems of meaning aren’t miraculously closed monoliths? Words don’t map perfectly onto the world?!?!?) or the French Communist Party (we shouldn’t go all for Stalin?!?!). But when you’re dealing with anything that doesn’t make wildly implausible claims about its own certain and unshakable foundations, it just seems strange. Pace post-structuralism itself, that means that it makes very little sense of human life in general.
One has to take a lot for granted before the post-structuralist project seems compelling, and post-boomer, post-avant-garde American public intellectuals embrace these assumptions. I offer an incomplete list: there is something deep within me that I’m inherently unable to express. Life has been drained of meaning. The human animal never gets what it wants. Anything we put into language is inevitably distorted. We’re all terrified of death. All ‘truth’ is ‘relative’. The Internet Blogs MySpace Texting Facebook Smart Phones Twitter Cloud Computing Instagram have has fundamentally changed the world, which is why nobody reads anymore. Short attention spans. We want unmediated reality, but can’t get it, and that’s tragic. We want to connect with reality. Self-consciousness is the only way we can think, but it also stops us from connecting with reality. Our time is uniquely chaotic and everything has to change in order to accommodate itself to that chaos.
Only these widely held, wildly implausible beliefs about human life could lead you to say something like “language never fails to fail us.” Only if you fiercely believe in certainty and immediacy to begin with will you be upset when you discover that there’s no such thing – nobody ever had an existential crisis when they discovered that unicorns don’t exist. The right response, as Wittgenstein and Adorno taught us, is to realize that language only fails you if you’re expecting it to do something impossible, say, transport someone’s brain into your skull. If you try your best, and don’t embrace irrationality, it’ll usually work out okay, and when it doesn’t, don’t blame it on language. Our cravings for certainty and immediacy are more or less juvenile, and we can outgrow them.
But this generation has had a lot of trouble growing up. At the age of 30, Shields read Kundera’s claim that it’s not hard to write “about the intersection of personal and political lives… when you go to the grocery store and the cannon of a Soviet tank is wedged into the back window.” He decided that the American version of that tank was “the ubiquity of the camera, the immense power of the camera lens on our lives, on my life, on the way I think about life.” Because there’s no original now, it’s just simulacrum, the signified has been split from the sign etc etc… What must he be like, I wonder, that he responds to Kundera’s self-aggrandizing, but moving claim by immediately wondering how he could answer that question? First, he must believe that art, like truth, is produced by suffering. Second, he must be jealous of the high degree of suffering undergone by artists in the Sovietish republics. Third, he must note that he himself is, in truth, also suffering, and honestly believe that his own suffering is as deep as the suffering of others. If you’re thirty and can’t tell the difference between a) choosing to watch lots of television and b) brutal military repression, you have some problems. But you can outgrow them.
Sadly, to judge by their writing, many writers and scholars continue to live in this bubble. Their world, like their problems, is entirely immaterial. They worry not about North Korea, the ongoing destruction of European economies or the horrors of the Middle East. They worry about twitter. This is what is so contemporary about Shields’ work: he says he wants access to other consciousnesses, but he wants to use only his own resources to get it. He doesn’t want to learn anything, doesn’t want to open himself up to ideas from other people, or to see what other people are really doing to each other, every day. He wants “to be equal to the chaos and contradiction of the cultural wiki ” but won’t actually use wikipedia.
Adorno, on the other hand, embraced the fact that art gets between us and society, and scorns the idea that it offers some direct, ‘immediate’ contact with the world. He didn’t yearn for that direct contact, because it doesn’t and cannot exist. That’s not something to be sad about, any more than you should be sad about the fact that you’re going to die. You have no option. Abstract sadness about your own death, abstract sadness about your own inability to feel or connect, is just self-deceit. Your life is amazing. If you feel shit, it’s because you live in a world that gives you an amazing life, but causes suffering for billions of people. You won’t feel better by wallowing in the ‘cultural wiki.’ You need to imagine a better world: the kind of world that we see, although falsely, in perfectly formed works of art.
Shields wants books that “coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes,” he likes “art with a visible string to the world.” But what he means by ‘the world’ is so attenuated that it’s difficult to see how it could connect to what most people mean by it. With no apparent self-consciousness, he suggests that “the sadness of the Yankee fan lies in his knowledge that his gorgeous dream is made of money. This is America, though: capital of capitalism.” If you’re a 57 year-old who believes that the injustice of capitalism = the absence of a salary cap in baseball, and that resistance = being a Mets fan, it might seem like a good idea for art to replicate the world. But what if you’ve actually learned something over the last 15 years? Contemporary culture isn’t blogs and university courses. It’s a broken economic system, widespread war and increasingly inequality. Why do we want to replicate that? Because the word-world link is so problematic?
No. We want to replicate it because we’re the winners. How Literature Saved My Life is a perfect image of liberal, triumphalist, pessimistic American academics.
David Shields, Art and Life’s Big Problems
The misuse of words
I, and people like me, get more pleasure from learning a thing’s name than from learning about the thing itself. When my then girlfriend offered me a potato pancake, I wasn’t too impressed, even though she told me all the history behind it. When she called it a latke, on the other hand, I was thrilled. The same thing happened when I read, in my college’s listings, the course title ‘Literature and Phenomenology.’ I had no idea what the latter was, and it turns out I’m not interested in it, but the word, phenomenology, stunned me. The more useless and obscure the thing I’m learning about, the more this effect is heightened. Take the jargon of rhetoric: anacoluthon, antanaclasis, asyndeton. Soraismus. Captatio benevolentiae. Lovely.
I suspect that David Shields, the author of How Literature Saved My Life, is this kind, my kind, of person. Consider his claim that David Foster Wallace’s essayistic technique is an example of what Adorno calls immanence: a particular artistic or philosophic relation to society. Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture, to reflect back its ‘whatness,’ refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.
‘What Adorno calls immanence’ is like saying ‘this is what we here in Los Angeles call a hamburger.’ All philosophers mean by ‘immanent’ something like ‘does not exceed whatever it’s based in.’ Shields’ claim then develops into something nonsensical. Immanence is no more complicity than a hamburger is a laptop. Shock absorbers do not reflect. But these glorious words: immanence, complicity, refracted…
Shields also loves phrases. He uses Wittgenstein’s “the world is everything that is the case”—the idea that philosophy should be limited to the study of how logical propositions relate to each other—to mean something like ‘I can write however I want.’ Wittgenstein changed his mind, of course; his later project was to show his readers that the big philosophical problems are more or less made up by philosophers. There are no Big Problems, no ultimate solution to Life, only life, a bunch of overlapping concepts and the way we go on using them. Adorno went a little further, arguing that the big philosophical problems are just ways of (at best) ignoring actual problems or (at worst) contributing to them; the real problems, the hard problems, are historically specific injustices. They’re not part of some inescapable condition; they’re our fault.
Clearly, Shields finds how these philosophers write, rather than what they say, appealing: the glorious words. But he’s all about The Big Inescapable Problems, working in the traditions of
i) existentialism. HLSML is an impassioned cry for a literature that “foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.”
ii) pessimism. The best explanation for a phenomenon isn’t the simplest one, but rather the one with the most depressing implications: “Death is my copilot… love equals death, art equals death, life equals death… all literature and all philosophy have come from this [formula].”
iii) and, in terms of form, the fuckshitup manifesto. Shields demands books that are “ready to break the forms” of literature itself, doing whatever they can “to vanquish the numbness that is a result of… expectation.”
Shields says ‘all philosophy and literature come from the formula life = death’ because if he said the much more sensible and true ‘my literature and philosophy,’ his readers would be able to tell that he’s working within these narrow, conventional traditions. And copping to those traditions would clash with his individualistic, formally imaginative, fuckshitup thing.
This move, deducing, from ‘I feel sad,’ ‘The world is fucked,’ is characteristic of Shields’ book in general, e.g., “I feel so remote from things… we’re existentially alone on the planet”. The move is not unique to him, indeed, it’s essential to the traditions in which he’s working. To know the world, one need only look into oneself with sufficiently clear-eyes. That means seeing through things that we mere mortals take at face value, like morality and how much we enjoy ice-cream. Twentieth century thinkers in this tradition know that “cognitive science and DNA” are the ultimate explanations of The Human Condition (yes, this is completely at odds with actual existentialism). They know that you don’t really like ice-cream, that it’s just brain chemistry and the survival of the fattest. These (almost always) men know that the most recent ‘scientific’ knowledge is true, and that is no truth, except for moral relativism. We know that moral relativism and ‘science’ are true because there’s something depressing about them. Truth, you see, is not something which demands our rational assent. It’s something we feel. And it feels bad to me. Therefore, the world is fucked.
Literature, Shields suggests, should help us deal with this sadness by treating the existential loneliness that is tied up with it. When he reads, he wants “to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone—I’ve gotten to this other person.” He wants “loneliness-assuaging” literary works that ‘transfer consciousness’ from the author to the reader. He wants immediacy, a promise of unmediated reality, raw nerve endings, and naked feeling. He wants, as much as possible, to gain unfiltered access to other people’s pain.
Now it seems to me that if you want access to other consciousnesses, you should start by accepting that other consciousnesses have something to offer you. But Shields is uninterested in this, so he uses Wittgenstein’s and Adorno’s words, but not their meaning. As I read through HLSML, it became obvious that, far from wanting access to other consciousnesses, Shields wanted only the reflection, or possibly refraction, of his own.
What he does very well is present the contemporary middle aged intellectual: journalist parents, grew up post-hippie, studied semiotics at Brown, MFA at Iowa, taught writing, undergoes a crisis, demands both complete autonomy (I can use other people’s words however I like), and complete access to others (give me your raw nerve endings).
This strange conjunction of demands makes more sense when you consider that the men and women of Shields’ generation are the last for whom post-structuralism/semiotics was an unchallenged epochal event. Post-structuralism was very good at pointing out that some x, previously believed to be certain and unshakeable, was in fact not certain or unshakeable. The method, in general, was to take a (in the broad sense) text and show that the author was making certain assumptions. This undermined the text’s own claims, which is politically radical. That’s a great liberator if you’re in the grip of structuralism (wait, systems of meaning aren’t miraculously closed monoliths? Words don’t map perfectly onto the world?!?!?) or the French Communist Party (we shouldn’t go all for Stalin?!?!). But when you’re dealing with anything that doesn’t make wildly implausible claims about its own certain and unshakable foundations, it just seems strange. Pace post-structuralism itself, that means that it makes very little sense of human life in general.
One has to take a lot for granted before the post-structuralist project seems compelling, and post-boomer, post-avant-garde American public intellectuals embrace these assumptions. I offer an incomplete list: there is something deep within me that I’m inherently unable to express. Life has been drained of meaning. The human animal never gets what it wants. Anything we put into language is inevitably distorted. We’re all terrified of death. All ‘truth’ is ‘relative’. The Internet Blogs MySpace Texting Facebook Smart Phones Twitter Cloud Computing Instagram have has fundamentally changed the world, which is why nobody reads anymore. Short attention spans. We want unmediated reality, but can’t get it, and that’s tragic. We want to connect with reality. Self-consciousness is the only way we can think, but it also stops us from connecting with reality. Our time is uniquely chaotic and everything has to change in order to accommodate itself to that chaos.
Only these widely held, wildly implausible beliefs about human life could lead you to say something like “language never fails to fail us.” Only if you fiercely believe in certainty and immediacy to begin with will you be upset when you discover that there’s no such thing – nobody ever had an existential crisis when they discovered that unicorns don’t exist. The right response, as Wittgenstein and Adorno taught us, is to realize that language only fails you if you’re expecting it to do something impossible, say, transport someone’s brain into your skull. If you try your best, and don’t embrace irrationality, it’ll usually work out okay, and when it doesn’t, don’t blame it on language. Our cravings for certainty and immediacy are more or less juvenile, and we can outgrow them.
But this generation has had a lot of trouble growing up. At the age of 30, Shields read Kundera’s claim that it’s not hard to write “about the intersection of personal and political lives… when you go to the grocery store and the cannon of a Soviet tank is wedged into the back window.” He decided that the American version of that tank was “the ubiquity of the camera, the immense power of the camera lens on our lives, on my life, on the way I think about life.” Because there’s no original now, it’s just simulacrum, the signified has been split from the sign etc etc… What must he be like, I wonder, that he responds to Kundera’s self-aggrandizing, but moving claim by immediately wondering how he could answer that question? First, he must believe that art, like truth, is produced by suffering. Second, he must be jealous of the high degree of suffering undergone by artists in the Sovietish republics. Third, he must note that he himself is, in truth, also suffering, and honestly believe that his own suffering is as deep as the suffering of others. If you’re thirty and can’t tell the difference between a) choosing to watch lots of television and b) brutal military repression, you have some problems. But you can outgrow them.
Sadly, to judge by their writing, many writers and scholars continue to live in this bubble. Their world, like their problems, is entirely immaterial. They worry not about North Korea, the ongoing destruction of European economies or the horrors of the Middle East. They worry about twitter. This is what is so contemporary about Shields’ work: he says he wants access to other consciousnesses, but he wants to use only his own resources to get it. He doesn’t want to learn anything, doesn’t want to open himself up to ideas from other people, or to see what other people are really doing to each other, every day. He wants “to be equal to the chaos and contradiction of the cultural wiki ” but won’t actually use wikipedia.
Adorno, on the other hand, embraced the fact that art gets between us and society, and scorns the idea that it offers some direct, ‘immediate’ contact with the world. He didn’t yearn for that direct contact, because it doesn’t and cannot exist. That’s not something to be sad about, any more than you should be sad about the fact that you’re going to die. You have no option. Abstract sadness about your own death, abstract sadness about your own inability to feel or connect, is just self-deceit. Your life is amazing. If you feel shit, it’s because you live in a world that gives you an amazing life, but causes suffering for billions of people. You won’t feel better by wallowing in the ‘cultural wiki.’ You need to imagine a better world: the kind of world that we see, although falsely, in perfectly formed works of art.
Shields wants books that “coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes,” he likes “art with a visible string to the world.” But what he means by ‘the world’ is so attenuated that it’s difficult to see how it could connect to what most people mean by it. With no apparent self-consciousness, he suggests that “the sadness of the Yankee fan lies in his knowledge that his gorgeous dream is made of money. This is America, though: capital of capitalism.” If you’re a 57 year-old who believes that the injustice of capitalism = the absence of a salary cap in baseball, and that resistance = being a Mets fan, it might seem like a good idea for art to replicate the world. But what if you’ve actually learned something over the last 15 years? Contemporary culture isn’t blogs and university courses. It’s a broken economic system, widespread war and increasingly inequality. Why do we want to replicate that? Because the word-world link is so problematic?
No. We want to replicate it because we’re the winners. How Literature Saved My Life is a perfect image of liberal, triumphalist, pessimistic American academics.
April 13, 2013
I didn't get it.
Like, at all. Maybe the author's analytical philosophizing was too intellectual for my brain. Or maybe there really wasn't much to get from the disjointed, reminiscent ramblings and literary musings of a burnt-out-from-life author. (Strangely though, I kind of want to try one of his other books...)
How can I describe this book? It was like peeking in the head of someone with severe ADD: "I really liked this one book because--hey guess what? I had a lot of sex in college--Speaking of college, this one time I read my girlfriend's diary and even though she didn't act pissed, she still broke up with--Oh! Let me share my email inbox with you. Here is a random email from someone that I'm just going to quote in its entirety--I don't really like novels anymore, because I'm super cynical and seriously sophisticated, but I do like the following TV shows--And so here is a list of all my favorite books and why. By the way, I'm actually going to stick with this train of thought for several pages. Kudos to the Adderall I started taking."
A second star because once in a while something he said really resonated (although a significant fraction of the time, he was appropriating someone else's thoughts). At times he definitely came off as condescending, but to me it felt unintentional and honest--like he was writing for himself more than his reader. Despite the many times I wondered why I was still reading, there were moments when it had the vulnerable feel of an intimate and personal exchange, like a gift of self from the author. That doesn't mean I related to or enjoyed all those components, but it had a certain exposed feeling to it that I found admirable.
I picked this book up because the title intrigued me and I never did find out how--or even if--literature saved anyone's life. So if that's what you're hoping to ascertain, you'll be sorely disappointed unless you can read into it something that I couldn't see.
Like, at all. Maybe the author's analytical philosophizing was too intellectual for my brain. Or maybe there really wasn't much to get from the disjointed, reminiscent ramblings and literary musings of a burnt-out-from-life author. (Strangely though, I kind of want to try one of his other books...)
How can I describe this book? It was like peeking in the head of someone with severe ADD: "I really liked this one book because--hey guess what? I had a lot of sex in college--Speaking of college, this one time I read my girlfriend's diary and even though she didn't act pissed, she still broke up with--Oh! Let me share my email inbox with you. Here is a random email from someone that I'm just going to quote in its entirety--I don't really like novels anymore, because I'm super cynical and seriously sophisticated, but I do like the following TV shows--And so here is a list of all my favorite books and why. By the way, I'm actually going to stick with this train of thought for several pages. Kudos to the Adderall I started taking."
A second star because once in a while something he said really resonated (although a significant fraction of the time, he was appropriating someone else's thoughts). At times he definitely came off as condescending, but to me it felt unintentional and honest--like he was writing for himself more than his reader. Despite the many times I wondered why I was still reading, there were moments when it had the vulnerable feel of an intimate and personal exchange, like a gift of self from the author. That doesn't mean I related to or enjoyed all those components, but it had a certain exposed feeling to it that I found admirable.
I picked this book up because the title intrigued me and I never did find out how--or even if--literature saved anyone's life. So if that's what you're hoping to ascertain, you'll be sorely disappointed unless you can read into it something that I couldn't see.
January 9, 2013
David Shields's books have the power to change the way you approach all art.
"What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver's license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That's what I want to hear."
Building on Reality Hunger's polemical call for the lyrical essay--a blending of fiction and fact and autobiography and fraud--How Literature Saved My Life presents an ambivalence about damn near everything (just see the bit where Shields first compares himself to the author Ben Lerner, then to George W. Bush) and in so doing, creates a piece of literature that illustrates the process of how Shields approaches literature, how this has evolved, how he thinks about thinking.
In some ways, Shields is like Nicholas Mosley plus Gregory Bateson plus the 21st Century.
"I don't want to read out of duty. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. I'm trying to stay awake and not bored and not rote. I'm trying to save my life.
What I love about Shit My Dad Says is the absence of space between the articulation and the embodiment of the articulation. The father, Samuel, is trying to teach his son that life is only blood and bones. The son is trying to express to his father his bottomless love and complex admiration. Nothing more. Nothing less."
One of the things that I love about Shields's program is that it puts so much emphasis on the narratorial "I" in a way that completely reframes how one approaches literature.
Another thing I love is the way he wants to shatter the genre boundaries . . . actually, that's kind of bullshit. It's a bit grander and more pedestrian than that--Shields doesn't believe in boundaries confining types of writing into separate categories. Writers should use everything at their disposal to express the way they think about the things they think about. In some ways, it's an extension of the metafictional moment--we all know this is bullshit, but instead of simply piercing the fiction veil, let's jam the text full of self-aware reflections, real-life experiences, stories, jokes, observations, characters, etc. Fiction is exploded, but authors still "save lives" by producing art that portrays their way of dealing with existence.
"I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness. Nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this--which is what makes it essential."
I can't end this review without mentioning how much I love the voice of this book. It's casual, brilliant, fun, and present. It reminds me a lot of Dubravka Ugresic in its ability to flip between personal experience and mind-blowing statement about society and/or art. Also, this is a book--like Reality Hunger--that readers will argue with, that will piss off readers wedded to more "conventional" novels.
"We live in a culture that is completely mediated and artificial, rendering us (me, anyway; you, too?) exceedingly distracted, bored, and numb. Straight-forward fiction functions only as more bubble wrap, nostalgia, retreat. Why is the traditional novel c. 2013 no longer germane (and the postmodern novel shroud upon shroud)? Most novels' glacial pace isn't remotely congruent with the speed of our lives and our consciousness of these lives. Most novels' explorations of human behavior still owe far more to Freudian psychology that they do to cognitive science and DNA. Most novels treat setting as if where people now live matters as much to us as it did to Balzac. Most novels frame their key moments as a series of filmable moments straight out of Hitchcock. And above all, the tidy coherence of most novels--highly praised ones in particular--implies a belief in an orchestrating deity, or at least a purposeful meaning to existence that the author is unlikely to possess, and belies the chaos and entropy that surround and inhabit and overwhelm us. I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive."
"What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver's license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That's what I want to hear."
Building on Reality Hunger's polemical call for the lyrical essay--a blending of fiction and fact and autobiography and fraud--How Literature Saved My Life presents an ambivalence about damn near everything (just see the bit where Shields first compares himself to the author Ben Lerner, then to George W. Bush) and in so doing, creates a piece of literature that illustrates the process of how Shields approaches literature, how this has evolved, how he thinks about thinking.
In some ways, Shields is like Nicholas Mosley plus Gregory Bateson plus the 21st Century.
"I don't want to read out of duty. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. I'm trying to stay awake and not bored and not rote. I'm trying to save my life.
What I love about Shit My Dad Says is the absence of space between the articulation and the embodiment of the articulation. The father, Samuel, is trying to teach his son that life is only blood and bones. The son is trying to express to his father his bottomless love and complex admiration. Nothing more. Nothing less."
One of the things that I love about Shields's program is that it puts so much emphasis on the narratorial "I" in a way that completely reframes how one approaches literature.
Another thing I love is the way he wants to shatter the genre boundaries . . . actually, that's kind of bullshit. It's a bit grander and more pedestrian than that--Shields doesn't believe in boundaries confining types of writing into separate categories. Writers should use everything at their disposal to express the way they think about the things they think about. In some ways, it's an extension of the metafictional moment--we all know this is bullshit, but instead of simply piercing the fiction veil, let's jam the text full of self-aware reflections, real-life experiences, stories, jokes, observations, characters, etc. Fiction is exploded, but authors still "save lives" by producing art that portrays their way of dealing with existence.
"I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness. Nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this--which is what makes it essential."
I can't end this review without mentioning how much I love the voice of this book. It's casual, brilliant, fun, and present. It reminds me a lot of Dubravka Ugresic in its ability to flip between personal experience and mind-blowing statement about society and/or art. Also, this is a book--like Reality Hunger--that readers will argue with, that will piss off readers wedded to more "conventional" novels.
"We live in a culture that is completely mediated and artificial, rendering us (me, anyway; you, too?) exceedingly distracted, bored, and numb. Straight-forward fiction functions only as more bubble wrap, nostalgia, retreat. Why is the traditional novel c. 2013 no longer germane (and the postmodern novel shroud upon shroud)? Most novels' glacial pace isn't remotely congruent with the speed of our lives and our consciousness of these lives. Most novels' explorations of human behavior still owe far more to Freudian psychology that they do to cognitive science and DNA. Most novels treat setting as if where people now live matters as much to us as it did to Balzac. Most novels frame their key moments as a series of filmable moments straight out of Hitchcock. And above all, the tidy coherence of most novels--highly praised ones in particular--implies a belief in an orchestrating deity, or at least a purposeful meaning to existence that the author is unlikely to possess, and belies the chaos and entropy that surround and inhabit and overwhelm us. I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive."
January 5, 2013
`Chronicles the endemic disease of our time: the difficulty of feeling.'
How many times can we say after reading a book that we want to at the very least start back to page 1 and read it again, or at the other extreme, memorize it. But that is what happens after luxuriating in the prose of David Shields' newest book, HOW LITERATURE SAVED MY LIFE.
This is a series of thoughts and reactions and ruminations on language, on fellow writers, on love, on the process of thinking, on life as he lives it and as we are living it, how he remembers moments in his life - being a stutterer and overcoming that `defect', of his first physical expression of love making, of encounters with celebrity literary people and those who falsely consider themselves celebrities, of the meaning of being placed on this planet and what to do with that luxury. He is at once deeply probing and almost unbearably hilarious. In truth, every page is a gem worth retrieving when we fear that the basic mentality of the world has forgotten the art of expression, of feeling. Some examples follow that will of course say it better than I:
`Language is what differentiates human beings from other species, so when I stutter, I find it genuinely dehumanizing. I still feel a psychic need to write myself into, um, existence. So, too, due to stuttering, I value writing and reading as essential communication between writer and reader. It's why I want writing to be so intimate: I want to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone - I've gotten to this other person.'
He can wax hilarious as when he describes a dominatrix lover's language, or the manner in which we glue our minds to the vacuity of talk shows (his section on the host `Delilah' is comic relief extreme) or reality television, and countless other ways we waste the air with which we speak or through which we communicate. He can call upon quotes form famous writers and plug-into them; `Thoreau: "The next time the novelist rings the bell, I will not stir thought the meeting-house burn down.' I like are with a visible string to the world. Lucian Freud: "I've got a strong autobiographical bias. My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings. I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness." My aesthetic exactly, for better and worse.'
And he can be acerbic about writers and literature: on being a judge for the National Book Award in 2007 he recalls the following - `And yet, in 1987, after the fiction panel didn't name Toni Morrison the winner, she approached the committee's chair, my former teacher Hilma Wolitzer, and said, "Thank you for ruining my life." If your life depends on winning an award chosen by a few people over lunch, there's something wrong with your life.'
Shields is all over the place in this book and that is what makes taking the journey with him so completely enjoyable. He closes with a poignant thought: `Language is all we have to connect us and it doesn't, not quite.....I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness. Nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this - which is what makes it essential.'
Grady Harp
How many times can we say after reading a book that we want to at the very least start back to page 1 and read it again, or at the other extreme, memorize it. But that is what happens after luxuriating in the prose of David Shields' newest book, HOW LITERATURE SAVED MY LIFE.
This is a series of thoughts and reactions and ruminations on language, on fellow writers, on love, on the process of thinking, on life as he lives it and as we are living it, how he remembers moments in his life - being a stutterer and overcoming that `defect', of his first physical expression of love making, of encounters with celebrity literary people and those who falsely consider themselves celebrities, of the meaning of being placed on this planet and what to do with that luxury. He is at once deeply probing and almost unbearably hilarious. In truth, every page is a gem worth retrieving when we fear that the basic mentality of the world has forgotten the art of expression, of feeling. Some examples follow that will of course say it better than I:
`Language is what differentiates human beings from other species, so when I stutter, I find it genuinely dehumanizing. I still feel a psychic need to write myself into, um, existence. So, too, due to stuttering, I value writing and reading as essential communication between writer and reader. It's why I want writing to be so intimate: I want to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone - I've gotten to this other person.'
He can wax hilarious as when he describes a dominatrix lover's language, or the manner in which we glue our minds to the vacuity of talk shows (his section on the host `Delilah' is comic relief extreme) or reality television, and countless other ways we waste the air with which we speak or through which we communicate. He can call upon quotes form famous writers and plug-into them; `Thoreau: "The next time the novelist rings the bell, I will not stir thought the meeting-house burn down.' I like are with a visible string to the world. Lucian Freud: "I've got a strong autobiographical bias. My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings. I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness." My aesthetic exactly, for better and worse.'
And he can be acerbic about writers and literature: on being a judge for the National Book Award in 2007 he recalls the following - `And yet, in 1987, after the fiction panel didn't name Toni Morrison the winner, she approached the committee's chair, my former teacher Hilma Wolitzer, and said, "Thank you for ruining my life." If your life depends on winning an award chosen by a few people over lunch, there's something wrong with your life.'
Shields is all over the place in this book and that is what makes taking the journey with him so completely enjoyable. He closes with a poignant thought: `Language is all we have to connect us and it doesn't, not quite.....I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness. Nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this - which is what makes it essential.'
Grady Harp
March 23, 2015
Remember the 'Simpsons' episode in which Bart sold his soul? He dreamed of an afterlife that could only be reached by rowboat, and the rowboat was only functional and useful for reaching the afterlife to those whose doubles, their souls, accompanied them. Bart had no soul, no double, so his boat could only limp around in a sad circle. David Shields believes that literature is, like Bart Simpson's soul, both a reflection of one's self (for the reader as much as for the writer; he'll only accept literature through which he can strongly identify with the author) and a necessity. Shields views life as a brief, doomed enterprise of self-aware, diseased creatures headed inexorably for death, and the only way he can think to make this enterprise endurable is to communicate with his fellow-creatures as we tumble headlong toward oblivion. Communication, he admits, is imperfect at best, but the written word (including its digital 21st century evolutions) is the best tool we have for it.
I can imagine this was an enjoyable book for Shields to write, crammed as it is with quotes and borrowed ideas from the authors with whom he most closely identifies and can, therefore, tolerate. It's not as enjoyable to read. At times it veers dangerously close to whiny/nebbishy/neurotic/self-pitying-whilst-self-deprecating material I associate with Woody Allen and Philip Roth, a tone I find grating and artless. Shields appreciates artlessness. He doesn't want layers of artifice between himself and the author of the book he's reading; he wants minimally-filtered truth so he doesn't feel alone in the universe. He denies that escapism has a place in literature, bleak though the human landscape may be.
In the end, has David Shields convinced me to care what he thinks about the purpose of literature? No, he has not. If a book is intended to be an instrument through which reader and author connect as mirror images of one another, this one fails. Or does it? Maybe the truth is that I see too much of myself in David Shields, and I dislike the book because I dislike certain aspects of myself. I could explore this theory in a series of loosely-connected, short essays full of borrowed thought, but I doubt anyone else would want to read it.
I can imagine this was an enjoyable book for Shields to write, crammed as it is with quotes and borrowed ideas from the authors with whom he most closely identifies and can, therefore, tolerate. It's not as enjoyable to read. At times it veers dangerously close to whiny/nebbishy/neurotic/self-pitying-whilst-self-deprecating material I associate with Woody Allen and Philip Roth, a tone I find grating and artless. Shields appreciates artlessness. He doesn't want layers of artifice between himself and the author of the book he's reading; he wants minimally-filtered truth so he doesn't feel alone in the universe. He denies that escapism has a place in literature, bleak though the human landscape may be.
In the end, has David Shields convinced me to care what he thinks about the purpose of literature? No, he has not. If a book is intended to be an instrument through which reader and author connect as mirror images of one another, this one fails. Or does it? Maybe the truth is that I see too much of myself in David Shields, and I dislike the book because I dislike certain aspects of myself. I could explore this theory in a series of loosely-connected, short essays full of borrowed thought, but I doubt anyone else would want to read it.
April 18, 2022
All the way through, it's ShieldsShieldsShieldsShields, whether directly or through writers who can mirror him (not just mirror his own concerns and beliefs). Confirmation bias everywhere. Much too stuck in the intellect. I don't think there was any mention of the natural world and the world of the senses gets short shrift -- apart from a warm glass of buttermilk, little delight in food or physical activity (hiking is mentioned as an activity, not whether it was liked), nothing about smells, and so on. (Sex does get mentioned, but he seems conflicted about enjoying that.) Instead, there's loneliness (though that doesn't explain his marriage or friendships) and the spectacle of a mind overly delighted in reflecting about itself. Like the restaurant scene in Being John Malkovich where, if I remember it correctly, all that's said, by various incarnations of JM, is "Malkovich."
Tedious, non-regenerative, a cul-de-sac -- and to top it off he ends with a trite, banal, and overly familiar 'conclusion.' Literature doesn't save his life, but a subset of it does, sort of (to what point, though?), a very small number of works that he swears by (but later seems to contradict) that leaves much out, regarded as pointless (and so, not really literature, by his standards). Too often a "we" is meant to include any reader (every reader?), and this gets tiring too.
Is this book worth reading? You have to think in particular ways to agree with Shields. Some readers might.
Tedious, non-regenerative, a cul-de-sac -- and to top it off he ends with a trite, banal, and overly familiar 'conclusion.' Literature doesn't save his life, but a subset of it does, sort of (to what point, though?), a very small number of works that he swears by (but later seems to contradict) that leaves much out, regarded as pointless (and so, not really literature, by his standards). Too often a "we" is meant to include any reader (every reader?), and this gets tiring too.
Is this book worth reading? You have to think in particular ways to agree with Shields. Some readers might.
May 29, 2014
How could I resist a book titled How Literature Saved My Life? I couldn’t and I didn’t. Of course, the title is a come-on; the book flap quotes Shields, who writes that he wanted “literature to assuage human loneliness but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this—which is what makes it essential.” Those words, I will later discover, are the last in the book. And it’s quite a journey getting there. Even though I end up rejecting Shields grim literary and world view [for him the goal is to find the world in literature], I do appreciate all his academic machinations throughout. I might have been bored or angry, but Shields never gives up trying to get me to see literature through his dark glasses.
Shields’ real agenda in this book is to argue that the only literature really worth reading is literature that fits into a mixed genre of books, of which How Literature Saved My Life just happens to be a perfect example. Early on he writes about a time he served on a National Book Award nonfiction panel. Another panelist kept arguing against one of Shields’ favorites arguing that the writer kept getting in the way of the story. Shields responded, “What could that possibly mean? The writer getting in the way of the story is the story” (30). Literary works worth reading must fit the writer inside the text; mere story telling is just not worthy work. As an example he offers Swann’s Way as a prime example, probably because none of us would challenge its worthiness and definitely because Proust is all over the text. Shields then goes on to make the case that the books worth reading are not those which follow the leads of the masters but those that go beyond: “If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms” (127). But the books Shields write about are included for the similar ways in which they all break the forms creating a new genre, which this book (and, apparently, several of Shields’ previous books, especially Reality Hunger) seems a perfect fit.
Furthermore, literature worth reading is full of melancholy. He cites Lorrie Moore, who wrote, “There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you” (67). It is by trying to put his experience into language that Shields makes his experiences register. It’s not surprising that there is an entire chapter on suicide. As he says in the introductory paragraph to the chapter listing “fifty-five works I swear by,” “the only books I care about strip the writer naked and, in that way, have at least the chance of conveying some real knowledge of our shared predicament” (131). (Even though Shields’ experiences are hardly universal.) As for those fifty-five titles, they are a mixed bag despite all sharing Shields’ genre agenda. And his plan for reading centers on his ability to perceive the central truth of the writer depicted in prose. Of course, if you are a writer who does not write a mixed genre or fails to keep your eye on the misery of life, Shields would say there is no truth in your work. His discussion begs the question: I read to get to the heart of the writer’s despair but if the writer does not zero in on despair, does not write in the Shieldsian genre, the work turns out not to have been worth reading. If we follow Shields, we are forever stuck in a small and increasingly miserable place. How much better this book would have been had it not such a limiting agenda.
Shields’ real agenda in this book is to argue that the only literature really worth reading is literature that fits into a mixed genre of books, of which How Literature Saved My Life just happens to be a perfect example. Early on he writes about a time he served on a National Book Award nonfiction panel. Another panelist kept arguing against one of Shields’ favorites arguing that the writer kept getting in the way of the story. Shields responded, “What could that possibly mean? The writer getting in the way of the story is the story” (30). Literary works worth reading must fit the writer inside the text; mere story telling is just not worthy work. As an example he offers Swann’s Way as a prime example, probably because none of us would challenge its worthiness and definitely because Proust is all over the text. Shields then goes on to make the case that the books worth reading are not those which follow the leads of the masters but those that go beyond: “If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms” (127). But the books Shields write about are included for the similar ways in which they all break the forms creating a new genre, which this book (and, apparently, several of Shields’ previous books, especially Reality Hunger) seems a perfect fit.
Furthermore, literature worth reading is full of melancholy. He cites Lorrie Moore, who wrote, “There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you” (67). It is by trying to put his experience into language that Shields makes his experiences register. It’s not surprising that there is an entire chapter on suicide. As he says in the introductory paragraph to the chapter listing “fifty-five works I swear by,” “the only books I care about strip the writer naked and, in that way, have at least the chance of conveying some real knowledge of our shared predicament” (131). (Even though Shields’ experiences are hardly universal.) As for those fifty-five titles, they are a mixed bag despite all sharing Shields’ genre agenda. And his plan for reading centers on his ability to perceive the central truth of the writer depicted in prose. Of course, if you are a writer who does not write a mixed genre or fails to keep your eye on the misery of life, Shields would say there is no truth in your work. His discussion begs the question: I read to get to the heart of the writer’s despair but if the writer does not zero in on despair, does not write in the Shieldsian genre, the work turns out not to have been worth reading. If we follow Shields, we are forever stuck in a small and increasingly miserable place. How much better this book would have been had it not such a limiting agenda.
February 4, 2013
maybe this didn't completely scramble my atoms as much as REALITY HUNGER, but even so, here's the thing...
We had just watched LIBERAL ARTS the night before I started this book. In it, there's this scene between the main character and this mopey, college kid, a conversation about INFINITE JEST, though the books is never named. A DFW aphorism is mentioned, and it haunted my entire reading of this book, even though it's not explicitly mentioned in connection to the book until very near the end...
"...Wallace, asked what's so great about writing, said that we're existentially alone on the planet-- I can't know what you're thinking and feeling, and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling-- so writing, at it's best, is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness."
This, quoted in a section called "How literature didn't save David Foster Wallace's life".
This is a book of contradictions, for and against literature, the limits formulating fiction, success and failure, literature as a bulwark against death. It's a slippery conversation Shields is having with himself. The only thing I take clearly from my frenzied reading of it, is that these are questions and conversations worth having, even if the answers shift, change, and consistently escape our grasp.
Shields speaks for and against himself, his reading life, his reality hunger, in a multitude, in the voices of the writers, and the books, that he has read, discarded, loved...
"There isn't any story. It's not the story. It's just this breathtaking world, that's the point. It's like the story's not important-- what's important is the way the world looks. That's what makes you feel the stuff. That's what puts you there."
We had just watched LIBERAL ARTS the night before I started this book. In it, there's this scene between the main character and this mopey, college kid, a conversation about INFINITE JEST, though the books is never named. A DFW aphorism is mentioned, and it haunted my entire reading of this book, even though it's not explicitly mentioned in connection to the book until very near the end...
"...Wallace, asked what's so great about writing, said that we're existentially alone on the planet-- I can't know what you're thinking and feeling, and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling-- so writing, at it's best, is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness."
This, quoted in a section called "How literature didn't save David Foster Wallace's life".
This is a book of contradictions, for and against literature, the limits formulating fiction, success and failure, literature as a bulwark against death. It's a slippery conversation Shields is having with himself. The only thing I take clearly from my frenzied reading of it, is that these are questions and conversations worth having, even if the answers shift, change, and consistently escape our grasp.
Shields speaks for and against himself, his reading life, his reality hunger, in a multitude, in the voices of the writers, and the books, that he has read, discarded, loved...
"There isn't any story. It's not the story. It's just this breathtaking world, that's the point. It's like the story's not important-- what's important is the way the world looks. That's what makes you feel the stuff. That's what puts you there."
February 6, 2013
I have the book and I can't say that I was all that impressed. Shields has a good way with a phrase, but his inquiries into how we should write in the current time seems less revolutionary than they are notes for a memoir he should finally write. Writing about writing is a domain long established and I don't see Shields as the new Roland Barthes. What some see as dangerous ideas I see as someone stalling on the question as to whether he can develop his own thesis without a constant citation of better writers to shore up the gaps in his thinking.
April 6, 2013
This book was... aimless. It's like the author saved little snippets of his own writing over the course of a decade and then compiled and published them. Granted, it was mostly book centric, but the title implies something about this book that it just doesn't live up to. The majority of it is filled with quotes from other authors and books, while Shields offers up a, "Yeah! Cool!" A lot of people seem to like this, though, which makes me wonder if maybe it's just because they think that if this guy can write a book, so can they.
May 12, 2013
All criticism is a form of autobiography. That’s the first line from “How Literature Saved My Life.” Every book recommendation says something about the recommender.
So I’m going to strongly urge that you read this book but don’t hold it against me if you don’t like it. I can’t imagine a breezier, easier way to think about good books and, just as much, why we read and what we expect to experience.
“How Literature Saved My Life” rockets along, mixing thoughtful bits of insight about Shields’ favorite books with brutally honest gazes in the mirror at Shields’ own quirks, foibles and imperfections.
Shields’ references run the gamut from low brow to high brow, from popular to refined: Spider Man, Renata Adler, Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Cobain, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Jonathan Lethem, The Addams Family, Tiger Woods, Ray Kurzweil, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sarah Manguso, Annie Dillard, Lester Bangs, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Brautigan, John Cheever, J.D. Salinger and more. Many, many more. On and on with the references and recommendations. It would take me years to read and catch up with Shields (but I want to).
Ultimately, Shields is fascinated by the ability of a novel (and writing in general) to assert, define and establish our place in the world—to confirm humanity and our uniqueness and individuality. He deconstructs favorite books with quick strokes but is at his best when he talks about the experience of reading and the power of the experience that’s possible merely by tracking words on a page.
“When I can’t sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves. There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them. I’ve read each of his books at least a dozen times. What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00 A.M. of the soul? For me, it’s how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of this work—what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable—lies in its revelation that this isn’t a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think.”
Shields closes the distance between his bookish, literary world and all us other ordinary readers with brutally frank tidbits about his utterly human desires and the way his mind processes the relationship with himself and others. I borrowed this book at the library but will buy myself a copy, not only for the book recommendations within it, but to have something to read when it’s “3:00 A.M. of the soul.”
So I’m going to strongly urge that you read this book but don’t hold it against me if you don’t like it. I can’t imagine a breezier, easier way to think about good books and, just as much, why we read and what we expect to experience.
“How Literature Saved My Life” rockets along, mixing thoughtful bits of insight about Shields’ favorite books with brutally honest gazes in the mirror at Shields’ own quirks, foibles and imperfections.
Shields’ references run the gamut from low brow to high brow, from popular to refined: Spider Man, Renata Adler, Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Cobain, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Jonathan Lethem, The Addams Family, Tiger Woods, Ray Kurzweil, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sarah Manguso, Annie Dillard, Lester Bangs, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Brautigan, John Cheever, J.D. Salinger and more. Many, many more. On and on with the references and recommendations. It would take me years to read and catch up with Shields (but I want to).
Ultimately, Shields is fascinated by the ability of a novel (and writing in general) to assert, define and establish our place in the world—to confirm humanity and our uniqueness and individuality. He deconstructs favorite books with quick strokes but is at his best when he talks about the experience of reading and the power of the experience that’s possible merely by tracking words on a page.
“When I can’t sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves. There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them. I’ve read each of his books at least a dozen times. What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00 A.M. of the soul? For me, it’s how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of this work—what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable—lies in its revelation that this isn’t a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think.”
Shields closes the distance between his bookish, literary world and all us other ordinary readers with brutally frank tidbits about his utterly human desires and the way his mind processes the relationship with himself and others. I borrowed this book at the library but will buy myself a copy, not only for the book recommendations within it, but to have something to read when it’s “3:00 A.M. of the soul.”
April 6, 2013
Not my cup of tea
In this series of essays author David Shields examines what he's learned from great literature--for this he includes texts as varied as Spiderman and ancient Greek drama--then applies it to his personal life and the general human condition. Since literature has also been an important part of my life--I studied the classic Great Books during my four years of college and reading has almost been a religion for me most of my life--I expected to enjoy this book, but it was hit and miss.
There are some intriguing ideas and insights, but at times I found myself unengaged and even put off. The reader will learn things about Shields that are both not so interesting and somewhat distasteful, like as a college student Shields read his girlfriend's diary (okay, so that was in the past, but I still find it creepy), and as a father he's smug about being considered atypical.
It’s a matter of taste though, and many will justifiably find these essays brilliant and illuminating. Shields is smart and comes across as intellectually hyper, making connections like his neurons are on speed. I just finished a book of personal essays by Elinor Lipman, another observer of life, and for me this book compares unfavorably. Lipman doesn't reference great literature much but she's perceptive, witty, gracious, and (no surprise since she's a novelist) a great storyteller. Shields is perceptive, but to me he falls short in the other qualities.
In this series of essays author David Shields examines what he's learned from great literature--for this he includes texts as varied as Spiderman and ancient Greek drama--then applies it to his personal life and the general human condition. Since literature has also been an important part of my life--I studied the classic Great Books during my four years of college and reading has almost been a religion for me most of my life--I expected to enjoy this book, but it was hit and miss.
There are some intriguing ideas and insights, but at times I found myself unengaged and even put off. The reader will learn things about Shields that are both not so interesting and somewhat distasteful, like as a college student Shields read his girlfriend's diary (okay, so that was in the past, but I still find it creepy), and as a father he's smug about being considered atypical.
It’s a matter of taste though, and many will justifiably find these essays brilliant and illuminating. Shields is smart and comes across as intellectually hyper, making connections like his neurons are on speed. I just finished a book of personal essays by Elinor Lipman, another observer of life, and for me this book compares unfavorably. Lipman doesn't reference great literature much but she's perceptive, witty, gracious, and (no surprise since she's a novelist) a great storyteller. Shields is perceptive, but to me he falls short in the other qualities.
April 1, 2013
Although my preconceived ideas about what this book was about were dashed right away, I found How Literature Saved my Life to be thought provoking, informative, and even amusing at times. The author kept my interest throughout the book, and one reason is because I never knew what he was going to say next.
Some of the things I particularly liked are the quotes from writers and philosophers, his honesty in writing about his own angst and observations, the tiny photographs at the beginning of each chapter, the listing of 50 of his favorite books, the sections on George Bush and Delilah, and his own pronouncements. For instance, Shields says that, "Texting is proof that humans are solitary animals who like being left alone as they go through life, commenting on. We're aliens."
I like to come away from each book I read either having learned something or felt something, and in this book, I learned plenty. There are only three things that would have made this book stellar (for me): not quite so much honesty (how do Rebecca and others feel about the author sharing personal information?), less graphic description of sexual scenes, and tighter, less disjointed organization.
March 12, 2013
The best word I can think of to describe this book is arrogant. The only book worth reading anymore is the kind of book only I am currently writing. And even I am fighting everyone tooth and nail to let me write it. Shields has an overwhelming obsession with David Foster Wallace (it seems subtext to almost every line). There are some lovely turns of phrase and interesting ideas, but I spent most of the book wanting to punch the author in the face.
August 20, 2019
David Shields is a contemporary essayist and fiction writer. His first novel, Dead Languages, is notable, as are his collections of essays. I chose to read this book with the expectation that the main focus would be on literature. I was frustrated with some aspects of the book in the early going, but ultimately found Shields personal views on literature and its ability to save (or perhaps not save) his life to be challenging and valuable. Throughout the book he turns quotation, memory, anecdotes and considerations of film, literature, love and death into a collage that enables introspection.
Shields is as concerned with methods of construction and questions of genre as with subject, and in doing so he meters out nuggets of revelation amid explications of both classical and popular subjects, from Prometheus to Spider-Man. He uses a circuitous approach that sometimes frustrated this reader and may do so for others. However, his apparent failure to articulate the ways in which "life and art have always been everything" to him often proved fascinating to contemplate.
David Shields stuttered throughout childhood, and initially regarded writing as an ideal outlet; now, in his mid-50s with more than fifteen books to his credit, he writes “to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else,” he has connected with his readers. He uses a frequently self-deprecating yet engaging tone, while employing the act of accrual in hopes of guarding against “human loneliness,” and in doing so, creates a type of personal, modern version of a commonplace book. For readers like myself, references to authors such as Ben Lerner, E.M. Cioran, Jonathan Safran Foer, Annie Dillard, Sarah Manguso and David Foster Wallace, among others, may be interesting or even appealing. He mixes references to books while interpolating quotes as voices intersecting on the page. For readers unlike myself who are creative-writing practitioners, how Shield fashions his own anxieties and persona into brief essays provides an alternative model for writing on self-hood, revealing the his struggle in oblique ways.
The book defies easy categorization (as have others of Shields’ works): It is both a paean to the power of language and a confrontation with the knowledge that literature can't, after all, fulfill deeper existential needs. It is a work of contradictions, subversion, depression, humor and singular awareness; Shields is at his best when culling the work of others to arrive at his own well-timed, often heartbreaking lines. His list of "Fifty-five works I swear by:" is one of the most fascinating and useful sections of the book (Part 6, pp140-156). I would recommend this book for those who hope that reading literature may save your life and have the persistence or potvaliance to persevere when the book veers into unknown territory. The author always brings it back to literature.
Shields is as concerned with methods of construction and questions of genre as with subject, and in doing so he meters out nuggets of revelation amid explications of both classical and popular subjects, from Prometheus to Spider-Man. He uses a circuitous approach that sometimes frustrated this reader and may do so for others. However, his apparent failure to articulate the ways in which "life and art have always been everything" to him often proved fascinating to contemplate.
David Shields stuttered throughout childhood, and initially regarded writing as an ideal outlet; now, in his mid-50s with more than fifteen books to his credit, he writes “to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else,” he has connected with his readers. He uses a frequently self-deprecating yet engaging tone, while employing the act of accrual in hopes of guarding against “human loneliness,” and in doing so, creates a type of personal, modern version of a commonplace book. For readers like myself, references to authors such as Ben Lerner, E.M. Cioran, Jonathan Safran Foer, Annie Dillard, Sarah Manguso and David Foster Wallace, among others, may be interesting or even appealing. He mixes references to books while interpolating quotes as voices intersecting on the page. For readers unlike myself who are creative-writing practitioners, how Shield fashions his own anxieties and persona into brief essays provides an alternative model for writing on self-hood, revealing the his struggle in oblique ways.
The book defies easy categorization (as have others of Shields’ works): It is both a paean to the power of language and a confrontation with the knowledge that literature can't, after all, fulfill deeper existential needs. It is a work of contradictions, subversion, depression, humor and singular awareness; Shields is at his best when culling the work of others to arrive at his own well-timed, often heartbreaking lines. His list of "Fifty-five works I swear by:" is one of the most fascinating and useful sections of the book (Part 6, pp140-156). I would recommend this book for those who hope that reading literature may save your life and have the persistence or potvaliance to persevere when the book veers into unknown territory. The author always brings it back to literature.
February 22, 2013
a myth is an attempt to reconcile an intolerable contradiction.that is indeed likely. yet in furtherance of the ever-elusive reconciliation of contradictions (are there, in fact, tolerable ones to be found?), onward we go constructing new myths and narratives to ease or assuage our individual and collective cognitive dissonances. why escape if it's only to learn that outside the prison walls awaits another jail? the truth is often captivating (in the obsolete sense). myths needn't be mere stories; the more potent ones come in the form of emotions, lifestyles, addictions, and pipe dreams aplenty. literature's illusions are hardly illusory.
we are all so afraid. we are all so alone. we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.there is perhaps a greater fear to be had in the company of others. fear and solitude needn't be bedfellows, however. a cultivated selfness offers a bulwark against angst and abyssery. why is being alone only ever equated with an absence of other people? that seems like a failure of both imagination and observation. if there are actually assurances to be had, why must we need them from without?
later on, what was absent from all the coverage of tiger's self-destruction was even the slightest recognition that for all of us the force for good can convert so easily into the force for ill, that our deepest strength is indivisible from our most embarrassing weakness, that what makes us great will inevitably get us in terrible trouble. everyone's ambition is underwritten by a tragic flaw. we're deeply divided animals who are drawn to the creation of our own demise.maybe because all of our myths and intolerable contradictions haven't really made us any less fearful or afraid to be alone after all. if we are scared of anything, it's only of being alive.
do i love art anymore, or only artfully arranged life?but you repeat yourself.
there is much to like about how literature saved my life, likely even more to think about. collage is distracting; it can fool the curious mind into looking for the adhesive. and it's all too easy to hide amidst the sticky. this ain't jazz, son, tell me what you really think. besides, why must literature be a savior? it ought to instead be a fertile loam from which we may reorient our shifting perspective. just because it's necessary, doesn't mean we need it.
August 13, 2016
Shields's eye-rolling hyperbolic assertions are irritating and sometimes just silly, but he makes me ask myself questions about what I look for in literature. I think he's correct that the fiction/non-fiction divide is arbitrary, and like him I prefer "windowpane" literature (Zadie Smith's term, if I'm not mistaken). But I can still tolerate/appreciate more fiction than Shields can: he's out there. When I listened to Shields give a Bat Segundo podcast interview for Reality Hunger a couple of years ago, I thought he was practically incoherent. And he's hardly even writing original prose these days - I think of him more as an enthusiast of others' writing (but that's kind of terrific when you think about it). There was a section in this book on Shields's thoughts about death and mortality that was better than anything I recall reading in The Thing About Life is That ..., and this book could considered a companion to, extrapolation on, defense of the schismatic Reality Hunger.
April 8, 2013
I never met a contradiction I didn't like. That's Shield's premise. Of course, literature cannot save a life, not even his. Unless he makes a living from literature as a writer and teacher. I suppose that's a way. Shields acknowledges many don't have the patience or time or brain power or interest in literature anymore so it's dying, but his alternative the non-fiction/fiction postmodernist kind of book doesn't work for me. You can only read so much Geoff Dyer or Sebald or or watch Sherman's Watch so many times (once is enough) without going crazy and wanting to read Greene or Maugham--at least for me. yes, technology is taking over. But I'd rather read good books as much as i can.
to me, Shields is the worse kind of solipsist: he wants others to read his damn book so we can somehow know HIS mind, his uninteresting autobiography and family, even though this book is really just a dialogue with himself. As a reader, as a philosopher, I read to encounter otherness.
to me, Shields is the worse kind of solipsist: he wants others to read his damn book so we can somehow know HIS mind, his uninteresting autobiography and family, even though this book is really just a dialogue with himself. As a reader, as a philosopher, I read to encounter otherness.
November 28, 2012
A rambling tour through David Shields's neurotic, collagist mind. I found myself marveling that someone would be so embarrassingly, publicly candid, but I also respect the way Shields's mind works. Sheila Heti once said in an interview (I'm paraphrasing from memory) that fiction disgusts her—the process of coming up with fake people and putting them through made-up circumstances when there are real experiences and feelings available for mining. I thought it was a stupid comment at the time, but after reading How Literature Saved My Life, I can see how there might not be any greater work for a writer than to sort oneself out.
January 23, 2013
It is weird to read Shields' work nearly 30 years after being in one of his writing classes in the mid80s. Some of his touchstones remained, seemingly unchanged, after all that time. He is still obsessed with lists of things, which somehow makes me happy.
As for this book, I think it is a good, fast, interesting read, but I doubt it is for everyone. As much as anything a great mish-mash of other books about the purpose of art/literature and how to try to live life. If nothing else, I want to track down some of the books he mentioned.
As for this book, I think it is a good, fast, interesting read, but I doubt it is for everyone. As much as anything a great mish-mash of other books about the purpose of art/literature and how to try to live life. If nothing else, I want to track down some of the books he mentioned.
February 15, 2021
There was lots about this book that I really liked — the various forms of nonfiction that the author discussed and modelled, for one thing. His passion for art and, specifically, literature for another. And the way that everything I’m reading right now is echoing everything else. For example, he quotes Sarah Manguso a lot and I just this morning finished her book ‘The Two Kinds of Decay’. And he talks about an art installation called ‘The Clock’ that I read about in ‘The Folded Clock: A Diary” two days ago. The synchronicities are appealing.
But now I need to read something light and frivolous, which Shields would just hate. Shields is all about the ‘human condition’, about how we manage to survive our lives. He’s heavy and academic and writes like the scholar that he is. I’m glad I read this book, will read more of his books but, for now, it’s time for something that doesn’t strain my brain.
But now I need to read something light and frivolous, which Shields would just hate. Shields is all about the ‘human condition’, about how we manage to survive our lives. He’s heavy and academic and writes like the scholar that he is. I’m glad I read this book, will read more of his books but, for now, it’s time for something that doesn’t strain my brain.
February 27, 2013
All criticism is a form of biography.
This is how David Shields opens his new memoir novel collection of essays piece of criticism … book, How Literature Saved My Life. The only genre that David Shields’ work fits into—and he makes this abundantly clear through his written persona—is that of a book in the plainest sense. These are his thoughts, written down, bound (or—I suppose—scanned and PDF-ized), and sold through various online and brick and mortar retailers. In his previous work, Remote (1996), Black Planet (1999), and The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008), Shields studied objects of his attention (the media’s ability to remove us from society, race and the Gary Payton-era Super Sonics, and the function of the human body, respectively) while using himself as a guinea pig. David Shields studied the macro by using the most micro of all experiments, himself. This lead to largely great results culminating in the triumphant Reality Hunger (2010) in which he announced the novel as dead (certainly not the first, but amongst the most persuasive) and laid down a manifesto of how literature will move on. What made Reality Hunger interesting was the fact that it contained little-to-none of Shields’ actual thoughts; rather, quotes from hundreds of (reluctantly) cited sources* that supported his views. Reality Hunger is an incredibly effective collage of an anti-manifesto and How Literature Saved my Life attempts to represent the message in practice.
As stated earlier, Shields is at his best when examining and interpreting his life through the prism of his mind. How Literature Saved My Life only attempts to study that very prism. The results are mixed. This is, essentially, a memoir with some thoughts on literature mixed in. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing (Shields’ hero Nabakov’s Speak, Memory comes to mind), except that he already wrote this book before Enough About You (2002). Shields returns to 3 odd themes throughout all of his work.
• He was a gifted athlete in high school (ah! The paradox of the true Renaissance man)
• His love of language (and his stutter’s impact on his love of language), and the fact that he “closed down” the library every night in college (the stuttering phantom, so to speak)
• He once read a girlfriend’s diary in college, leading him to become the uber-boyfriend and make her every fantasy come true. All though Shields confessed this to the girl months later, I would hope she got over quicker than he did—since I’m still reading about it as he nears 60 years old.
It seems Shields has become obsessed—or merely possessed by—his literary persona. As a fan, I enjoy the triumph of the stutterer/ex-jock coming of age in the library of Brown University, I really do. But, I’m more interested in what that character became. This book fails to answer that question. While Shields demands that literature move forward from the novel and demands that all readers only search for work that questions truth, he refuses to move forward in his own work—constantly mesmerized by his own past.
The inverse of his opener is not true.
While criticism may be biography, your biography does not constitute criticism.
* So reluctant in fact, that—although he included citations in the index of the book—he also included a dotted line and instructed the reader to cut them out.
This is how David Shields opens his new memoir novel collection of essays piece of criticism … book, How Literature Saved My Life. The only genre that David Shields’ work fits into—and he makes this abundantly clear through his written persona—is that of a book in the plainest sense. These are his thoughts, written down, bound (or—I suppose—scanned and PDF-ized), and sold through various online and brick and mortar retailers. In his previous work, Remote (1996), Black Planet (1999), and The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008), Shields studied objects of his attention (the media’s ability to remove us from society, race and the Gary Payton-era Super Sonics, and the function of the human body, respectively) while using himself as a guinea pig. David Shields studied the macro by using the most micro of all experiments, himself. This lead to largely great results culminating in the triumphant Reality Hunger (2010) in which he announced the novel as dead (certainly not the first, but amongst the most persuasive) and laid down a manifesto of how literature will move on. What made Reality Hunger interesting was the fact that it contained little-to-none of Shields’ actual thoughts; rather, quotes from hundreds of (reluctantly) cited sources* that supported his views. Reality Hunger is an incredibly effective collage of an anti-manifesto and How Literature Saved my Life attempts to represent the message in practice.
As stated earlier, Shields is at his best when examining and interpreting his life through the prism of his mind. How Literature Saved My Life only attempts to study that very prism. The results are mixed. This is, essentially, a memoir with some thoughts on literature mixed in. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing (Shields’ hero Nabakov’s Speak, Memory comes to mind), except that he already wrote this book before Enough About You (2002). Shields returns to 3 odd themes throughout all of his work.
• He was a gifted athlete in high school (ah! The paradox of the true Renaissance man)
• His love of language (and his stutter’s impact on his love of language), and the fact that he “closed down” the library every night in college (the stuttering phantom, so to speak)
• He once read a girlfriend’s diary in college, leading him to become the uber-boyfriend and make her every fantasy come true. All though Shields confessed this to the girl months later, I would hope she got over quicker than he did—since I’m still reading about it as he nears 60 years old.
It seems Shields has become obsessed—or merely possessed by—his literary persona. As a fan, I enjoy the triumph of the stutterer/ex-jock coming of age in the library of Brown University, I really do. But, I’m more interested in what that character became. This book fails to answer that question. While Shields demands that literature move forward from the novel and demands that all readers only search for work that questions truth, he refuses to move forward in his own work—constantly mesmerized by his own past.
The inverse of his opener is not true.
While criticism may be biography, your biography does not constitute criticism.
* So reluctant in fact, that—although he included citations in the index of the book—he also included a dotted line and instructed the reader to cut them out.
August 29, 2013
a
Hay autores que llegan en el momento justo, es decir, cuando se los necesita. Exactamente eso me ha sucedido con David Shields: mi interés por la búsqueda experimental, por aquellas obras que amplíen los márgenes del género y desafíen los estándares, encontró en Shields un estandarte, un guerrero, alguien con una convicción férrea en llevar adelante un proyecto literario sumamente personal.
b
¿Qué es How Literature Saved My Life? La respuesta no es sencilla, porque si de algo se trata es, justamente, de evadirse de las clasificaciones sencillas, huir de las taxonomías que conforman nuestras expectativas. Mezcla de ensayo autobiográfico, de memoria, de crítica literaria y cultural, How Literature Saved My Life se erige como la puesta en marcha de la estética que Shields demarcó en su libro previo Reality Hunger: el trabajo con el material de la vida, el recurso del fragmento y el collage, el montaje de citas, la estructura no secuencial como representación del pensamiento.
c
Aquí Shields explora su propia condición humana en variedad de planos, con un nervio común que tensa la aparente dispersión del texto: la literatura. Los libros recorren cada punto del ensayo, y la conciencia autoreflexiva del autor va elaborando destellos explicativos, microepifanías que ilustran la ansiedad de saberse, de conocerse. Nosce te ipsum: How Literature Saved My Life es la búsqueda de sí mismo en los libros, a través de la escritura. Las miserias, los deseos, pulsiones, conflictos, todo se nos muestra con transparencia visceral. Shields adopta el tono confesional sin jamás caer en el patetismo gratuito; si hay un patetismo es el del pathos, el de la emoción como forma de autoconocimiento cuando es atravesada por la razón.
d
Es necesario resaltar una palabra: intensidad. Ese es el efecto sensible que provoca el libro (el verbo no es baladí: este es un texto intencionalmente provocador) cuando se lo lee; el entusiasmo de Shields se corresponde con el entusiasmo del lector abierto a nuevas posibilidades. La verdad de este libro -como en Realitu Hunger- hay que buscarla antes en la forma que en el contenido: uno puede no estar de acuerdo con mucho de lo que Shields dice y opina (y sin embargo, hay algo ahí que resplandece con el fulgor de lo incómodo; de nuevo, el desafío), pero la forma muestra su verdad novedosa, apartándose de los registros comunes.
e
Admito que cinco estrellas es quizás la consecuencia de un arrebato subjetivo, pero no puedo sustraerme a cómo How Literature Saved My Life interpeló mis necesidades de lector y escritor. Me interesan los escritores que (me) descubren mundos, Shields es uno de ellos.
Hay autores que llegan en el momento justo, es decir, cuando se los necesita. Exactamente eso me ha sucedido con David Shields: mi interés por la búsqueda experimental, por aquellas obras que amplíen los márgenes del género y desafíen los estándares, encontró en Shields un estandarte, un guerrero, alguien con una convicción férrea en llevar adelante un proyecto literario sumamente personal.
b
¿Qué es How Literature Saved My Life? La respuesta no es sencilla, porque si de algo se trata es, justamente, de evadirse de las clasificaciones sencillas, huir de las taxonomías que conforman nuestras expectativas. Mezcla de ensayo autobiográfico, de memoria, de crítica literaria y cultural, How Literature Saved My Life se erige como la puesta en marcha de la estética que Shields demarcó en su libro previo Reality Hunger: el trabajo con el material de la vida, el recurso del fragmento y el collage, el montaje de citas, la estructura no secuencial como representación del pensamiento.
c
Aquí Shields explora su propia condición humana en variedad de planos, con un nervio común que tensa la aparente dispersión del texto: la literatura. Los libros recorren cada punto del ensayo, y la conciencia autoreflexiva del autor va elaborando destellos explicativos, microepifanías que ilustran la ansiedad de saberse, de conocerse. Nosce te ipsum: How Literature Saved My Life es la búsqueda de sí mismo en los libros, a través de la escritura. Las miserias, los deseos, pulsiones, conflictos, todo se nos muestra con transparencia visceral. Shields adopta el tono confesional sin jamás caer en el patetismo gratuito; si hay un patetismo es el del pathos, el de la emoción como forma de autoconocimiento cuando es atravesada por la razón.
d
Es necesario resaltar una palabra: intensidad. Ese es el efecto sensible que provoca el libro (el verbo no es baladí: este es un texto intencionalmente provocador) cuando se lo lee; el entusiasmo de Shields se corresponde con el entusiasmo del lector abierto a nuevas posibilidades. La verdad de este libro -como en Realitu Hunger- hay que buscarla antes en la forma que en el contenido: uno puede no estar de acuerdo con mucho de lo que Shields dice y opina (y sin embargo, hay algo ahí que resplandece con el fulgor de lo incómodo; de nuevo, el desafío), pero la forma muestra su verdad novedosa, apartándose de los registros comunes.
e
Admito que cinco estrellas es quizás la consecuencia de un arrebato subjetivo, pero no puedo sustraerme a cómo How Literature Saved My Life interpeló mis necesidades de lector y escritor. Me interesan los escritores que (me) descubren mundos, Shields es uno de ellos.
May 8, 2013
How literature might have saved the life of David Shields even if he can’t explain it yet -
I have finally read David Shields. He is one to read in our time – or isn’t he?
How Literature Saved My Life is a collage of thoughts, a collection of things David Shields enjoys reading, watching, and thinking about, assembled loosely by theme, with the overarching message that he loves literature.
I have noted that some critics praise him for
… his uncanny ability to tap into the short attention span of modern culture and turn it into something positive. He doesn’t linger on any subject for more than a few pages—not because it isn’t worth the time, but because he’s so adept at concision that any more elaboration is unnecessary.
Personally I wonder if he is not choosing the easy way out here, adept at concision – or just not patient enough to stay around to develop his own ideas?
Shields advocate form experimentation, but experimentation in itself is not enough – it has to be well done to be really interesting. To put it short: Shields has to work on his style.
I like the idea of this book – an attempt to say something valuable about the importance of literature – a lot better than the final result. Maybe Mr. Shields should give it another go & try again (preferable in his own words) to explain How literature saved his life???
I have finally read David Shields. He is one to read in our time – or isn’t he?
How Literature Saved My Life is a collage of thoughts, a collection of things David Shields enjoys reading, watching, and thinking about, assembled loosely by theme, with the overarching message that he loves literature.
I have noted that some critics praise him for
… his uncanny ability to tap into the short attention span of modern culture and turn it into something positive. He doesn’t linger on any subject for more than a few pages—not because it isn’t worth the time, but because he’s so adept at concision that any more elaboration is unnecessary.
Personally I wonder if he is not choosing the easy way out here, adept at concision – or just not patient enough to stay around to develop his own ideas?
Shields advocate form experimentation, but experimentation in itself is not enough – it has to be well done to be really interesting. To put it short: Shields has to work on his style.
I like the idea of this book – an attempt to say something valuable about the importance of literature – a lot better than the final result. Maybe Mr. Shields should give it another go & try again (preferable in his own words) to explain How literature saved his life???
August 10, 2016
Mr. Shields understood that he was not alone when he read literature -
"When I can't sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves. There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them. I've read each of his books at least a dozen times. What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00 A.M. of the soul? For me, it's how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon what it hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of his work - what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable - lies in its revelation that this isn't a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think."
What incredible power literature has, don't you think? It can take us to lands we'll never see, it can introduce us to people we'll never meet, it can broaden our horizons beyond our greatest imagination and it can even save our lives.
Literature yields power. And I wish for all of you the discovery of that power. For when that happens, I know, that it will surely save your life too.
"When I can't sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves. There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them. I've read each of his books at least a dozen times. What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00 A.M. of the soul? For me, it's how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon what it hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of his work - what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable - lies in its revelation that this isn't a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think."
What incredible power literature has, don't you think? It can take us to lands we'll never see, it can introduce us to people we'll never meet, it can broaden our horizons beyond our greatest imagination and it can even save our lives.
Literature yields power. And I wish for all of you the discovery of that power. For when that happens, I know, that it will surely save your life too.
May 7, 2013
I'll quote Shields from page 201 of HLSML to give what seems to me a clear theme for this book: "Stoicism is of no use to me. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face."
And that's what HLSML does, much as Reality Hunger did. For Shields, literature is dialogue. He's not solitary in creating a book. He's entering a big conversation.
I recently watched this video called "The Amount of Stuff Our Bodies Make in a Year," and it seems to me that Shields' oeuvre manages this same type of inventorying with thoughts and words from all the people/authors he has encountered in his lifetime.
That has a grand appeal for me as a reader. I wish I had the ability to do that as a writer, but I don't manage to keep material in my brain for that long. So I rely on people like Shields to do it for me.
And that's what HLSML does, much as Reality Hunger did. For Shields, literature is dialogue. He's not solitary in creating a book. He's entering a big conversation.
I recently watched this video called "The Amount of Stuff Our Bodies Make in a Year," and it seems to me that Shields' oeuvre manages this same type of inventorying with thoughts and words from all the people/authors he has encountered in his lifetime.
That has a grand appeal for me as a reader. I wish I had the ability to do that as a writer, but I don't manage to keep material in my brain for that long. So I rely on people like Shields to do it for me.
March 10, 2013
I'm giving this four stars because I like the writing, and because Shields does make some very witty, astute observations. But I have to say that it's not a four-star book overall. It's not even a coherent essay. As a collection of biographical moments, as a set of bits of memoir, there are some very well-done things here. But Shields has no overarching thesis here, and even in the final chapter, when he does purport to tell us "how literature saved his life", there's no real focus. There are some good observations here on lieterature, mortality, and Shields' own life, but this isn't a memoir (or an essay) that really addresses the title issue--- how our lives are shaped by literature and what we expect from "high" lit. Four stars for writing style, but maybe only three (or 2.5, if my mood were to be a bit less charitable) as a project grade.
August 12, 2013
When Shields refers to a book as “mere miscellany” it seems like an apt label for his own musings. Hardly an in-depth argument for the saving grace of literature, this book reads like a lot of jottings, skims over subjects with a goodly amount of name dropping and his list of 55 works he’d swear by contains brief paragraphs or frequently just a sentence commending the work giving little notion of why he valued them. His world-view of literature is antithetical to my own. He says “I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time” whereas I think such transference is the very seed of imagination and empathy. He argues that the traditional novel” is no longer germane, being not remotely congruent with the speed of our lives”. So speaks one whose attention span is damaged, largely I’d guess in Shields’ case, by depression and ennui.
February 22, 2013
I tried to tell a friend about "How Literature Saved My Life" and I found myself searching for adequate words. My sentences all ended in "you just have to read it."
I've been reading David Shields for 25 years, and his fiction, essays and criticisms have always been a moving target, but his latest offering jerks you out of whatever comfort zone you may find yourself and demands that you start reassessing.
Lists of any kind are not high on my list (pun intended), but Shields' 55 works that he swears by is copied and stuffed in my 2013 notebook. Some how I will get to all of them.
If you read seriously, write seriously or think seriously, this book needs to be in your library. It might not be a life-saver but I wouldn't rule it out.
I've been reading David Shields for 25 years, and his fiction, essays and criticisms have always been a moving target, but his latest offering jerks you out of whatever comfort zone you may find yourself and demands that you start reassessing.
Lists of any kind are not high on my list (pun intended), but Shields' 55 works that he swears by is copied and stuffed in my 2013 notebook. Some how I will get to all of them.
If you read seriously, write seriously or think seriously, this book needs to be in your library. It might not be a life-saver but I wouldn't rule it out.
April 12, 2013
A really wonderful mix of personal essay and fanatical reading journal/lit-crit. David likes to champion the underdogs and the risk-takers in the world of fiction and memoir. It's a refreshing approach--he's not just spotlighting the contemporary favorites, he's digging deep and using his favorite obscurities and lesser-knowns as a mirror on his own work. My favorite parts: reading his girlfriend's journal in college, the similarities he has to George W. Bush, and his thoughts on Frederick Barthelme's novel, The Brothers.
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