Readings

by Sven Birkerts

Readings combines the best of Sven Birkerts's previously published criticism with vital new essays. A dazzling writer whose clarity, rigor, and far-flung intellectual curiosity have been widely praised, Birkerts the literary critic is in top form in these pages. Whether discussing Elizabeth Bishop or Don DeLillo, Rilke or Kerouac, Keats or The Great Gatsby , he brings fresh insight, sharp thinking, and reflective sensitivity to each of his subjects. A brilliant cultural commentator, Birkerts also addresses broader, more associative topics, such as biography and the enigma of poetic inspiration, contemporary nostalgia, our modern sense of time, and the future of the creative spirit. As Jonathan Franzen wrote in The New Yorker , "Birkerts on reading fiction is like M.F.K. Fisher on eating or Norman Maclean on fly casting. He makes you want to go do it." This is writing about reading at its best.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

274 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."

Birkerts graduated from Cranbrook School and then from the University of Michigan in 1973. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. He now lives in the Boston area, specifically Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife Lynn, daughter Mara, and son Liam.

His father is noted architect Gunnar Birkerts.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

"So, without changing my original premise, I would add a second: that the time of the novel, the phenomenological interior that necessarily reorganizes the reader's perceptions, may just be the ideal antidote for the time sickness that we are all, most of us unwittingly, beginning to experience. That the novel is not only a lens upon the present but also can serve to counteract some of the most pernicious tendencies of that present.

Postmodern time is, as we all know, fragmented, composed of competing simultaneities. Our daily operations pull us ineluctably away from the deep durational time experience that is, or was, our birthright. The novel, through language, through the complex decelerating system of syntax, pushes us against the momentum of distraction. It is restorative- and difficult. Indeed, it is often restorative precisely to the degree that it is difficult, especially as the difficulties of reading generally have as much to do with the reader's failures of attention as they do with the text on the page. One does not dive from CNN or Masterpiece Theatre into the deep brine of prose easily. All of the cognitive rhythms have to be slowed to andante.

I would argue, then, that the contemporary novelist who is not in any way addressing the changed reality of the present may yet be serving an important function. For the reader, that is- not necessarily for the genre itself. A crucial distinction. Through his deployment of the language, through giving expression to his vision, the writer may be creating a self-contained alternate order- a place where the ambitious reader can go to counter the centrifuge of late modernity, where he can, at least for a time, possess the aesthetic illusion of focus and sustain a single-minded immersion in circumstance no longer so generally available. That this is vicarious does not undermine its validity: it is a mode of surrogate living that most closely approximates what living felt like before technologies began to divide us from ourselves.

Any good novel, then (I won't quibble here about what constitutes "good"), can afford its reader a way of being- if not being there, in the other world, then being here, in this. It proposes a locus of reclamation, becomes a place inside the place we are situated, a charged time contained within the more diffuse time of daily living. And while this is not exactly a revolutionary function for the embattled genre, it will become increasingly important as the equation of existence grows complex beyond all calculation."


This was written in 1996, and I can't help but think: "YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET!"

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite of the Birkerts books I've read. It's a joy to watch his mind at work.

[Mark]

This was OK but it's truly a lot of older white male afraid of changes in society. He has some good points but considering he claims to not interact with most of what he complains about technologically then he has a limited stance from which to critique.

He is also highly elitist.

Close to half of the book is essays on particular authors and often particular books. Out of all of them, only one made me want to engage with the material he was writing about. That one was a riff off of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Perpetual Orgy, which itself engages with Flaubert's Madame Bovary. I have read Bovary and could see revisiting it and the Vargas Llosa book sounds like a great companion piece to it.

So ... mostly meh.

[Sara Habein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Heady, intellectual ruminations on the state of culture and literature. This is a book for the concept-over-character readers, who like to discuss the meanings of ideas rather than the people who create them.

My full review can be found on Glorified Love Letters.