Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence

by Geoff Dyer

Out of Sheer Rage is the best book about not writing a book about D.H Lawrence ever written. Other people have written untraditional, even loopy tributes to the priest of love before--including boon companions Anais Nin and Henry Miller--but no one has done it with Dyer's chutzpah, or with such fantastic success.

Dyer started out with the intention of writing either a sober academic study of Lawrence or a novel based on his subject's life but couldn't seem to do either. The academic study, he realized, was really just an excuse to read Lawrence's work, and the novel never even acquired a rudimentary shape in his mind. Instead, he somehow convinced his publisher to pick up the tab for his lengthy globetrotting pilgrimage, which took him from Paris to Rome to Greece to Oxford--not to mention such Lawrentian hotspots as Taos and Mexico and San Francisco. The result is an extended, often hilarious, meditation on seafood, English TV, Dyer's own creative impulses, and occasionally even Lawrence.

In Lawrence's seminal prose he finds some justification for his own capricious indulgences: "What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free.... There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious." Yet he refuses to read Lawrence's novels, confining himself to letters, travel reportage, and other casuals. Indeed, "[o]ne gets so weary watching authors' sensations and thoughts get novelised, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression."

Dyer's fascination with Lawrence's minorabilia suggests not only an oblique criticism of the contemporary novel, but a promising direction for the memoir. Perhaps clean, well-lighted subjectivity is a dead end, and the future lies with eccentric, provisional works along the lines of Flaubert's Parrot and How Proust Can Change Your Life--or Out of Sheer Rage. After all, Dyer's bright (and brilliantly shambolic) book of life reminds us of why we read in the first place: to see the surprising ways one person can be brought to life by another. --Michael Joseph Gross

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Travel, Literature, Essays, Literary Criticism

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book about being prevented from doing the thing you most want to do, the thing you're totally psyched about and can't wait to do, by yourself. Geoff Dyer wants to write a searing soul-wrenching book about DH Lawrence (guru, priest, prophet, you know) and Out of Sheer Rage is an account of how he didn't do it. Because his life got in the way, and his brain and heart got in the way, his girlfriend got in the way, the cat, the neighbour's rabbit, hamsters got in the way



but mainly his terrible neuroses - they really got in the way. So here is a guy I can completely empathise with because my entire life has been quite like that, except without any hamsters.

Strangely enough the partner of a friend of mine also tried to write a book about DH Lawrence for some years and that never happened either. Everyone kept telling him about Out of Sheer Rage and he kept deliberately not reading it, because although Geoff didn't write his book, he did write a great book about not writing it, which my friend's partner didn't - because the idea never occurred to him and because if it had he would have dimissed it as indulgent silliness - so that was a cruel treble whammy, Geoff Dyer stole his idea then failed like him to do it, but then rescued the situation by writing a side-splitting journal of heroic failure.

Pure treacle tart.

[Krok Zero · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the risk of stating the obvious, let's acknowledge this: what determines the quality of a memoir (not that Out of Sheer Rage can be so narrowly classified, but bear with me) has precisely nothing to do with the kind of life experience the writer has had, and everything to do with what kind of writer the writer is. Ask yourself: does this book exist because some jerk wanted to tell his marketably fascinating life story, or does it exist because a real writer had something interesting to say about himself outside the confines of fiction? The life experiences of, say, George W. Bush are of inherent interest to anyone who lived through his presidency, but I'd sooner fork-stab myself a la Albert Brooks in Drive than read Bush's ghostwritten scribbles. (Pick a less loaded example if you want; there's no shortage of shitty memoirs out there.) Meanwhile, the life experiences of Geoff Dyer are, as he confesses numerous times in this book, of absolutely no interest to anyone. And yet this "memoir" (again, forgive the insufficient terminology) is a hilarious masterpiece. I don't care about anyone's life. I don't want to read anyone's accounting of whatever dramatic or harrowing or epiphanic (or, god forbid, "funny") thing they experienced. Nor am I interested in "travel memoirs" where people talk about the exotic places they go. The only places I go are Dunkin Donuts and the library, so fuck you. And I don't particularly want to read a study of D.H. Lawrence, either. Yet Out of Sheer Rage is a combination of personal memoir, travel memoir and study of D.H. Lawrence. And it's one of the best books I've read in a while and maybe one of the best books I've read ever.

More precisely, this is a memoir about Geoff Dyer's failure to write a study of D.H. Lawrence. And yet even the metatextual implications of that premise can't really prepare you for the unique wonderfulness of these pages. This is a great book about procrastination and neurotic self-sabotage; it is a heroically honest literary explication of one man's astonishingly deep neuroses. Much of the text concerns itself with "irrelevancies," with the arbitrary and mundane and ostensibly dull fixations that precipitated Seinfeld's famous auto-critique: a show "about nothing." Indeed, this book suggests something like what might be produced by Larry David if he were a) British, b) an outstanding prose writer and c) obsessed with D.H. Lawrence. Yes, on top of the irrelevancies -- which, of course, are actually the most relevant relevancies of all -- this book is occasionally, and even interestingly, a book about D.H. Lawrence. But more importantly it is a book about Geoff Dyer as he sees himself in D.H. Lawrence. Through his obsessive immersion in all things Lawrence and his compulsive avoidance of producing any work about Lawrence, Dyer clarifies his own selfhood and relates it back to the reader with wisdom in a manner that caused Steve Martin to very plausibly state that Out of Sheer Rage is the funniest book he's ever read. Beyond that, the book is hard to describe; many reviewers here and elsewhere have categorized it as "uncategorizable" and I have to agree. Just read it. To give you a taste here's a passage that hit so close to home it almost caused me physical pain. Real talk:

I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing -- which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn't something else I should be getting on with. ... When I'm working, I'm wishing I was doing nothing and when I'm doing nothing I'm wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I've got to do and then, when I've got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I'm out, I'm wondering how long it will be before I'm back home.

Ja-heen-yuss.

***

Urgent postscript. So I wrote that stuff above feeling great about the book and everything, then I watched the little video embedded on the Goodreads page for this book in which Geoff Dyer briefly discusses a few of his books and drops this bombshell: the premise of Out of Sheer Rage, that it's an account of Dyer's failure to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, was in fact a total fabrication. Dyer never intended to write a straightforward study of Lawrence, always meant for this book to be sprawling and uncategorizable. In other words, the foundation of the book is a lie. The question is, does that matter. I don't have an answer and I still love the book, but this revelation does make Dyer's aim a bit clearer: he set out to illustrate an idea mentioned in the book, that the best kind of literary criticism is not actual "literary criticism" but rather further literature in response to the original literature. Hence Dyer conceiving this multi-headed hydra beast of a book in response to Lawrence. The chutzpah on this guy. It's seriously a great book though so who cares if it's all a lie.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

'I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort'

With an attitude like that, it's no wonder Dyer didn't write the book about Lawrence he wanted to write. I'm surprised he even bothered writing a book about trying to write a book about Lawrence. He even mentions later on 'I doubt this book will be of any interest to anyone' And yet, it was just so darn readable!
Out of Sheer Rage works as a sort of travelogue - from Paris and Greece, to Sicily, Rome and Mexico - of a writer seemingly having something of a semi-mid life crisis as he struggles with writer's block to get his academic Lawrence project off the ground. An exhausted and tormented Dyer records his time spent painstakingly studying Lawrence, and reveals the many reasons for his identifying with the writer who made him want to become a writer, whilst also writing of his experiences travelling with his almost-wife Laura.

He likes a good whinge and a moan does Geoff. So if writers like Thomas Bernhard (who even gets mentioned here) irritate the hell out of you, then you might find Dyer a bit of a pain. I didn't find the roars of laughter that some critics did, but it was no doubt an amusing and fascinating book. I'm not even that fussed on Lawrence, but it really didn't matter. Yes it's about Lawrence, but also about many things besides Lawrence. 4.5/5

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is completely wild. Geoff Dyer is supposed to be writing a book on D.H. Lawrence and he does everything imaginable so that he doesn't have to do this. We are taken on marathon journeys to Sicily, the UK, Taos in New Mexico, etc. and it is exhausting to hear about Mr Dyer's complaints. He even buys an apartment in Oxford to help him write this book. Does he want to be there, no but he feels he has to be. His poor girlfriend Laura deserves a medal staying with him. Is it love or is it lust? Perhaps insanity? I don't know but they stay together.

Nevertheless, apart from this there are some very amusing episodes and I must confess that I have never come across this writing style before. Do I like the book? The jury is still out but all in all, it is a fascinating book!

It's somewhat touching too that Dyer sees Lawrence on the outside of the Bloomsbury Group. Lawrence's meeting with Ottoline Morrell is also quite extraordinary. He thinks one thing and states another to her. Anecdotes on Lawrence's ability to do absolutely nothing and yet profit from it; his love of housework and of painting. Incredible to read this.

Do you need to read this book? Well yes, I think you do! You will never have lived properly if you haven't experienced the mind of Geoff Dyer! You need to enter into his psyche!

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's what's known in our business as a "genre bender" -- that is, an undefinable sort of book that really defies definitions. So let me try.

For starters, take a deep breath. This book has no divisions in the way of chapters. Dyer just pushes it at the top of a mountain (say, Mount Ostensibly a Biography) and watches it roll. And roll. And roll.

Luckily, the momentum stops on p. 232 (hardcover) because readers might not be able to sustain their patience with a biography of D.H. Lawrence that's not a biography of D.H. Lawrence but sort of is a biography of D.H. Lawrence if you don't mind redefining biographies of D.H. Lawrence.

To me, it's as much a book about dithering as it is about Lawrence. And it's humorous, but not in any sustained way. That is, you hit stretches where Dyer's voice and self-excoriation and world-excoriation 5-star crack you up. Then you hit stretches where it doesn't. Instead, it kind of sort of in a way whines.

But that's OK. Lawrence did, too, which is the point, I guess (safe at the plate!). At its best points, Out of Sheer Rage is quoting Lawrence's books or his letters and so, after all, you DO get to know the author of Women in Love and Lady Chatterly's Lover a bit. Just not a whole lot. Learning via impressionism, then. Or cubism, if you're feeling a bit disjointed as a reader.

Rage is also a bit of a travel book as Dyer and wife hopscotch around the world looking for (and failing to find) inspiration by following the trail of the restless Lawrence. Dyer laments that he does not feel like writing the book. He celebrates that he does not feel like writing the book. He actively does not write the book. All in excruciating detail.

Maybe, then, the reader can take heart. Here we have an opus to procrastination, something we are all guilty (until proven innocent) of.

It all reminds me of a brand new book I own that's growing old in my bedside table's well. That book, Oblomov, is a classic (apparently) about a man fully engaged in non-engagement, a character who exemplifies the Taoist concept of wu wei (non-action or non-doing). For whatever reason (its size, maybe?), I continually fail to pick it up and read it, even during the two summer months when I am on teaching hiatus.

Reading Oblomov is my version of Dyer's writing a Lawrence book, only I could never stretch 232 pages out of it. That takes a real pro. Over 200 pages on non-doing? Yeah, I could say, "I wrote the book on laziness," but Dyer has called my bluff.

He actually did it. Here it is. And it looks like a lot of work!


Nota bene: Dyer's choice for favorite D.H. Lawrence book? Dark horses! He nods to The Complete Letters of D.H. Lawrence and, of all books, Sea and Sardinia.

Favorite Lawrence poems? "The Ship of Death" followed by "Snake."

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about D.H. Lawrence in the same way that Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is a film of The Orchid Thief. In other words, it’s not particularly about Lawrence at all; it’s just as much, if not more, about Geoff Dyer – his laziness, his procrastination, his curmudgeonly attitude, his futile search for the perfect places to read Lawrence’s works and write about Lawrence, his failure to feel the proper reverence at Lawrence sites, and so on. While I can certainly sympathize with Dyer’s wry comments about his work habits (“I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort”; “better reading than writing”; “all things in which I am interested … [are] a source of stress and anxiety”), I liked best the parts of the book where he actually writes about Lawrence. He has an impressive familiarity with Lawrence’s body of work, including the complete letters, as well as the life story, so there’s no denying he could have written a definitive biography.

I too have visited the Eastwood heritage sites in Nottinghamshire and the Taos ranch, way back in my undergraduate days when I did independent Hardy and Lawrence tourism in summer 2004 and then attended the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America 2005 conference in Santa Fe. Ultimately I found academia too dry and soul-crushing, and Dyer feels much the same: “Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.” That, I think, explains why he didn’t write an academic study in the end. Yet he still could have written a book about Lawrence, instead of one where Lawrence lurks in the margins. I prefer the way James Lasdun worked in a brief foray to Lawrence territory in his Give Me Everything You Have.

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 5 out of 5]

uzun zamandır böyle beğenerek okuduğum bir anlatı olmamıştı.
d.h.lawrence’a dair bir kitap yazmak için onun yaşadığı yerleri dolaşan geoff dyer’ın anı-deneme-eleştiri türleri arasında dolaşan bu kitabı hem müthiş bir içdökümü hem de akademik edebiyat araştırmasının zıttı olarak parlıyor.
çünkü aslında seylan’a gideceğime mars’a giderim diyen lawrence’ın 3 ay sonra kendini seylan’da bulması gibi, dyer da tam bir tutarlılık insanı :))
daha en başta ege’de bir adaya gidip lawrence şiirleri üzerine çalışma yapacağını düşünürkenki bavul hazırlama aşaması bize geoff dyer’ı tanıtıyor. bin kere bavula girip çıkan bütün şiirleri cildi elbette ege’ye gelmiyor. ve bu elbette dyer’ın çalışmama bahanesi oluyor.
işin ilginç yanı sevgilisi laura’nın buna katlanabilmesi çünkü ben daha ilk sayfalarda döverim dediğim bu adamı kitabın sonuna geldiğimde öldürmeye karar vermiştim. (sonra fotolarına baktım, yakışıklıymış, vazgeçtim.)
lawrence hayatında pek çok tutarsızlık olan bir yazar. ve dyer, bu büyük yazarın peşinden gidip onu anlamaya çalışan tutarsızlıklar, kararsızlıklar kralı. bence en başta lawrence’ı yazmaya da bu benzerlik sebebiyle karar veriyor.
kitapta yazarın akademik edebiyat eleştirilerine bok attığı bölümleri ağzım kulaklarımda okudum açıkçası. oxford üzerine söyledikleri, bir yazarı kurmaca eserlerinden çok mektuplarından, günlüklerinden, yaptığı yemeklerden, tamiratlardan, millete çemkirmesinden daha iyi tanıyabileceğiniz iddiasına kesinlikle katılıyorum. zaten dyer kitap boyunca lawrence’ın şiirlerini, romanlarını tekrar okumaya karar verip katiyen okumuyor. tiyatrodan nefret ettiğine karar verip lawrence oyunlarını izlemiyor.
kitap boyunca aslında lawrence’ın izini yaşadığı yerlerden, izlenimlerinden, mektupları ve fotoğraflarından takip ediyoruz.
kitabın yazılma aşamasına, o zorluğun içtenlikle anlatımına, kopukluğuna, son derece özgün olmasına bayıldım diyebilirim. hele dyer’ın uzun uzun anlattığı oaxaca gezisi, grip korkusu ve danimarka’daki konuşma bölümlerinde kıkırdamaktan zor ilerledim.
böyle bir kitabı türkiye’de biri yazmış olsa, işte ne bileyim yahya kemal’i anlatırken park otel’den, çapkınlığından ve beleşçiliğinden yola çıkıp edebi tarafına değinmese, üstüne de bunları kendi yaşamıyla birleştirip böyle komik bir biçimde anlatsa yayıncılar tarafından direk reddedilirdi. aha da buraya yazıyorum. yeniliğe kapalılığımız yayın camiasında da aynı.
ben geoff dyer’ın tam tersi bir insanım. planlıyım, düzenliyim, çalışmadan duramam, sözümü tutmazsam uyuyamam, nerde ne yapacağımı bilemeden tatile gitmeyi bırakın komşu ilçeye geçmem. o yüzden beni lawrence ayrı dyer ayrı yordu. ama değdi mi değdi.
çeviri ilk başlarda “yapıyor olmak, giriş yapmak”larla epey tekliyor açıkçası. sonra sonra açılıyor. bir yerde teyze-hala hatası gözüme çarptı. ben de akrabalara takığım herhalde.
şimdi canım feci halde hem lawrence hem dyer okumayı çekiyor.

[Patrick O'Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage is about neurosis, inertia, obsession, apathy, introversion, extroversion, incongruity and instability. In other words it’s about the human condition. What Dyer is overly exemplifying are all the frailties that humans project and endure: I’m in a room full of people and I’m lonely. I want to be loved but not by the person that I am with. While I am munching on this meal I’m thinking of another meal. I don’t want to be here I want to be there. It is endless. Dyer agonizes so beautifully. His insane rants on why he can’t write about what he is supposed to be writing about are staggering in their minute details and then he’s off on another tangent, totally unrelated, like a whacked-out ADD sufferer whose Ritalin script just ran out. Yet, in the end, he was able to write the book, a book about what really mattered. I thought Out of Sheer Rage was amazing: his use of language beautiful, his ability to so artfully express his anxieties, at times stunning. I never cared much about DH Lawrence and I still don’t. But then Out of Sheer Rage never really was about DH Lawrence.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

This entertaining look at authorial and general angst—fast becoming a sleeper hit on Goodreads—almost meets the hype, minus the actual parts about D.H. Lawrence, who is as pleasant to read as F.R. Leavis’s Guide to Dysentery. The narrator, unnamed, but accepted as Dyer himself, stumbles through his charmed life fretting about the best European paradise in which to write his sober academic study, the hilarity escalating as his Lawrencian angst takes over. Dyer’s apparent wealth sets up him up as a figure of fun until the more probing parts about his past take over, when he assumes an air of Roquentin. Clearly, however, Dyer isn’t a writer paralysed by inaction (see his books page), but for the duration, I was fooled. The US edition changes the subtitle to Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence—to make it seem less like a sober academic study?

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The hardcover copy that I borrowed from the library has a yellow cover and a see through jacket. On the yellow cover is a photo of Geoff Dyer and on the see-through jacket is an image of DH Lawrence so that, when put together, their faces are laid over each other. This seems to me a perfect illustration of the book, which is a very personal take on Lawrence... a mixture of memoir, travel-writing, literary study, and existential meditation. Oh yeah, and how could I forget? Comedy: Geoff Dyer is a hilarious writer.

I have a theory that maybe all great writers and readers (for that is essentially what Dyer is here, a reader and a fan) have fully developed senses of humor. It’s so hard to think of any great writers who weren’t funny, though that humor can vary widely in shade. Kafka was funny. Flaubert was funny. So was Bernhard, Beckett, Musil, Chekhov, Gogol, Cortazar, Proust, Joyce, Stein. Oddly enough, I listened to an interview with Dyer recently where he claimed that Sebald was funny, though I don’t personally see it (except in small moments).

It seems to me a pity that literature classes across America are not--right this second--laughing until milk comes out of their noses instead of talking about post-feminism or whatever post- / -ism it is they like to throw around. If I walked into a literature class where everybody was dying from laughter, I would know I was in good hands, that these people got it. Dyer, for example, got it, and that is why throughout this book he is laughing: at himself, at Lawrence, at us. And making us laugh.

Though officially about Lawrence, this book could just as well have been a book about Rilke, Camus, or Bernhard. He certainly talks about the first two enough. And the latter is mentioned only in passing, but seems to be a ghost in the prose throughout the first hundred pages or so, and dropping in again towards the end. This deliberate and loving imitation of Bernhard is charming and funny, but also appropriate in a book about the vacillating indecision that grips one in the condition of living. For indecisiveness is not only a characteristic of Dyer, Lawrence, Bernhard and modernism, but also of the essay form: first try to see something this way, then try to see it from a completely different angle.

The longer I stayed the more powerful it became, this feeling that I was just passing through. I had thought about subscribing to Canal Plus as a way of making myself feel more settled but what was the point in subscribing to Canal Plus when, in all probability, I would be moving on in a few months? Obviously the way to make myself more settled was to acquire some of the trappings of permanence but there never seemed any point acquiring the aptly named trappings of permanence when in a couple of months I might be moving on, might well be moving on, would almost certainly be moving on, because there was nothing to keep me where I was. Had I acquired some of the trappings of permanence I might have stayed put but I never acquired any of the trappings of permanence because I knew that the moment these trappings had been acquired I would be seized with a desire to leave, to move on, and I would then have to free myself from these trappings. And so, lacking any of the trappings of permanence, I was perpetually on the brink of potential departure. If I felt settled I would want to leave, but if I was on the brink of leaving then I could stay, indefinitely, even though staying would fill me with still further anxiety because, since I appeared to be staying, what was the point in living as though I were not staying but merely passing through?

Most of this book is about Geoff Dyer’s inability to write a study on Lawrence, about his crippling writer’s block, and his weak-willed half-assed attempts at any kind of traditional goal-oriented pursuit. He travels around the world to see the places Lawrence stayed and wrote at, only to glean very little from these experiences but annoyance, illness, boredom, and injuries. It is extremely funny to read about, but also it is a perfect solution to not being able to write about Lawrence. Dyer seems to have taken Beckett’s oft-misunderstood maxim of "Try again. Fail again. Fail better" to heart. He sinks to the lowest of lows, and instead of fighting it, he sinks some more and revels in it. Or as D.H. Lawrence himself put it "Let a man fall to the bottom of himself, let him get to the bottom so that we can see who he really is."

Luckily, this undignified shameful approach to writing was very helpful for me, since I was also a lazy no-good son of a bitch in the middle of writing an ambitious book review on a Wittgenstein biography. I had collected so many ideas and notes. But every time I started in on it, I was overwhelmed with my inability to convey what was most important. Thankfully Dyer provided the clear-headed cop-out I was looking for: I could write about my inability to write and thus have my cake and eat it too!

Because the very thing that made it impossible to write my review was the very thing that was most important, namely the unutterable. The idea of saying something and not have any of it leak out. Likewise, in Dyer’s study of Lawrence, the very idea of gripping indecisiveness, placelessness, and constant discontent which he talks about going through are the very things that he brings out in his portrait of Lawrence. For this is not a sober study of Lawrence’s major works and themes, but rather a cherry-picked impressionistic portrait of the man himself, mostly salvaged from his letters and tossed off statements. This is the Lawrence that most interested the fanboy in Dyer, the unmediated Lawrence. This is also the Lawrence that most interests me. Literature has enough sober academic studies, what it needs is impassioned fanboys writing unprofessional failures of books, but failures that are bold enough to be human and revealing. We need to see the flesh and blood in literature! I love this sentiment:

As time goes by we drift away from the great texts, the finished works on which an author’s reputation is built, towards the journals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, jottings. This is not simply because, as an author’s stature grows posthumously, the fund of published texts becomes exhausted and we have to make do not only with previously unpublished or unfinished material but, increasingly, with matter that was never intended for publication. It is also because we want to get nearer to the man or woman who wrote these books, to his or her being. We crave an increasingly intimate relationship with the author, unmediated, in so far as possible, by the contrivances of art. A curious reversal takes place. The finished works serve as prologue to the jottings; the published book becomes a stage to be passed through -- a draft -- en route to the definitive pleasure of the notes, the fleeting impressions, the sketches, in which it had its origin.

And later, he draws the same conclusion about his own book:

If this book aspires to the condition of notes that is because, for me, Lawrence’s prose is at its best when it comes closest to notes.

I read another book recently, How Should a Person Be?, about not being able to write a book. The book was originally supposed to be a play. But was eventually turned into a personal meditation about trying to write the play (as well as many other things). But throughout she wrestled with the idea of whether it was OK to just let herself be herself, to embrace the failure, or change the definition of failure, rather than go through with something that was much more difficult. It is nice to see so many books wrestling with this idea. But I do tend to agree with Dyer that the wrestling and the failing and the owning up to it, making it your own, is the important part. “Anyone can have a breakdown, anyone.” he says on page 170, “The trick is to have a breakdown and take it in one’s stride.”

[Corynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just couldn't handle this one. Maybe I am too impatient at this point in my life, but sheesh, I had to stop reading this book by Dyer. Don't get me wrong, it's not poorly written; Dyer is an intelligent, clever writer, and this book is very successful at what it sets out to do. He does a bang-up job of capturing the neurotic, indecisive, paralysis experience on paper; so good that it annoyed the hell out of me to read it. His "meta" jokes about Lawrence's own writing experience were cute too, but the real-life, drunk-as-hell neurotics surrounding me on the bus made for a more entertaining show. Maybe a girl can only afford so much personality disorder in her life, or maybe I'm shallow, but it's either MUNI or Dyer. I can't afford both. Also, I'm the sort of person who can't stand to watch movies where the plot consists entirely of a bad plan going terribly, terribly wrong. Too painful. Ditto with public humiliation and failure. Maybe you'll like it better.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I seem to be on a post-Heller trip, with this one, Edouard Louis, and now Joshua Ferris' short stories!

This is a hilarious ode to procrastination and the grinding restlessness that accompanies the freedom of adulthood, which is rarely articulated as clearly as it is here. I can highly recommend to any adult, who will surely get something out of this account!

It's important to remember that straight white men who love to go on double-bindathons gain a lot of pleasure from discovering Catch-22-esque double-binds. And what's fun about double-binds is that they are mostly self-imposed and rarely as all-inclusively insurmountable as they are made out to be. They're more about how life is perceived than how it really is. What's painful is that you can't see the solution; not that it isn't there :)

[Andy Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can strongly recommend 'Out of Sheer Rage' by Geoff Dyer. It manages to tell the reader a great deal about Lawrence as an artist - poet, novelist, painter and letter writer - and as a person. But it does so in a most unconventional, quirky and humorous style in which Dyer wears his learning lightly. I’ve read it twice and thoroughly enjoyed it and I may just read it for a third time!

Here is my video review of the book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGWPH...

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's increasingly rare that I read a book that enthuses me as much as books routinely did when I was in my late teens and early twenties. This book made me feel like I was nineteen again.

It's a darkly funny, almost stream-of-consciousness prolonged essay on the joys and heartache of procrastination, writer's block, laziness, and guilt. D. H. Lawrence plays a role, but only a peripheral one: Dyer mainly uses Lawrence as a vehicle to explore his own fundamental lack of interest in anything having to do with Lawrence. (While reading this book, I kept remembering the foreword to another book, written by a different Lawrence (T. E., _Revolt in the Desert_): "[I:] would need [...:] an interest in the subject which was exhausted long ago in the actual experience of it.") Dyer pays explicit homage to Thomas Bernhard, and the book follows the form and style of a typical Bernhard novel: dyspepsia raised to an operatic art form.

_Out of Sheer Rage_ reminded me that the best writing is performative. Reading this, you could almost imagine Dyer onstage, a la Spaulding Gray, not just reciting the book but reliving it. I could hear tone shifts and fluctuations in the volume, see his expressions and gestures as I was reading. All along, I was aware that what I was reading was a performance by Geoff Dyer the comic performer, a character that was both less than Geoff Dyer (insofar as the spectacle he makes of himself is a caricature of just one aspect of his life and personality), and more (again, a caricature). The book is a tour de force, in the original sense of the term.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite non-fiction book, ever. It is smart, funny, interesting, and honest. It does something I love: combines studying an academic subject (in this case, DH Lawrence) with more personal thoughts and stories.

I really can't say enough about it. And if you think that writing a book about procrastinating the book you actually want to write is a little gimmicky, you'd be right. But the writing is so good, I don't care.

[Cliff M · Rating 1 out of 5]

The biggest problem in the life of middle aged Oxford University alumnus Geoff Dyer is where to live (and smoke weed) while writing his “next book” (a book about DH Lawrence, whose work he doesn’t seem to like). He is torn between Paris, Rome or San Francisco. Are ordinary people supposed to empathise with this entitled git? Safe to say, this person didn’t (but I notice from the broadsheet reviews that many of his fellow alumni did.).

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I'll read this year.

Oh wat kan deze man geestig schrijven over uitstelgedrag, chronische teleurstelling en over gevoelens die je in bepaalde situaties hoort te voelen maar tot je eigen verbazing en spijt wegblijven. Het hoofdpersonage deed me soms denken aan Larry David in Curb your enthusiasm en dat bedoel ik uiterst enthousiasmerend.

"The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term 'awe'."


"He had a perfect, firm handshake, the sort that suggested that the handshake originated here in the south and was then exported north and west. I wondered: did the handshake originate, as I had once read (in a Fantastic Four comic) as a gesture of trust, a way of demonstrating that you had no weapon in your hand? Or was it, from the outset, a compromise, enabling both parties to offer one hand in friendship while keeping the other free for protection, a way of establishing physical contact while maintaining the maximum possible distance? I felt Ciccio would know. There was knowledge in his handshake

[Marcello S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Libro che mette insieme narrativa, saggistica, racconto di viaggio, autobiografia.
Dove l’autore (1) parte con l’idea di scrivere qualcosa e poi scrive tutt’altro, (2) si muove per divagazioni e dettagli insignificanti e (3) parla moooolto si sé.
Ha a che fare con Sebald, Carrère, Knausgård. Anche con Bernhard.
Sorprendente che sia uscito nel 1997 (ma solo ora in traduzione italiana).

[80/100]

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the end Geoff Dyer decides he's depressed. Perhaps his depression, if that's what ails him, if, indeed, he's ailing, is the driving impulse behind Out of Sheer Rage. He's unable to act decisively. As soon as he decides on a course of action he changes his mind. Out of such indecision, which he calls the detour as straight line, he's written a book about D. H. Lawrence without being fully committed to writing it. The result is a kind of memoir of his traveling in Lawrence's footsteps to Eastwood, England, Taormina in Sicily, Oaxaca in Mexico, and Taos, New Mexico in pursuit of the writer but as much in pursuit of himself. His reflections on Lawrence and what they mean for himself wash back and forth, like waves. And this vacillation about purpose and objectives cause Dyer to have an easy, cavalier acceptance of how events unfold, from the details of a meal (he hates fish but eats plenty of it) to train travel.

It's a serious work, but Dyer jukes about a bit. I think this is mostly because he's a self-effacing writer. He seems to want to deny his own stature through his seemingly clumsy stumble from topic to topic. Yet the gravitas of his thought and criticism is evident. He spends time, for instance, on the nature of criticism versus that of reading. He thinks academics miss living through the works they write about. He also meditates on the relationship of work (writing) to life. He's not only interested in how Lawrence solved the problem but also how others--Updike, Rilke, Larkin--managed it.

He jukes about, too, by writing humorously. Not many books can make me laugh out loud, but I chuckled at some of Dyer's hopeless predicaments. Part of the humor is a product of the self-effacement. It's also partly a reluctance to demonstrate he takes the Lawrence project seriously. At the same time he's a generous companion. He travels with his "almost wife" Laura. She shows herself to be imperturbable, and the curmudgeonly Dyer allows himself to be smacked down by Laura's frequent putdowns. You gotta like her.

But the above is not to obscure the point. Dyer is a serious writer. Some consider him to be an important writer. Not only does he write prose like silver, he's a discerning critic. It's all on display here.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Steve Martin mentioned this one as a book that made him laugh: "...Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage.” One doesn’t think a book about D. H. Lawrence could be “laugh-out-loud funny.” But it was..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/bo...

With humor, who knows? Worth a try, if the library has a copy. Aha, they do!

Well, hrm. Not off to a good start, as the book (so far) is an endless list of procrastination jokes: the author wanted to write about D. H. Lawrence, and also wanted to write a novel. Since he couldn't decide which to start on, he worked on neither. Plus extended riffs on choosing whether to continue living in Paris, move to Rome, or move somewhere else. Mind, it's competently written, but when the jokes fall flat, it's hard to feel much need to press on. Setting it aside for now ....

I gave up and returned it to the library. Not for me!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote my comments after reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence but before reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Introduction. If you own the Canongate edition, stop reading my comments and start reading O’Farrell’s Introduction. I’m delighted that O’Farrell made a few of the points that I tried to make, but of course her comments are far more thorough, more intelligent, and more apropos than mine. No, I’m not offended at all: just stop reading this right now and read O’Farrell’s Introduction instead.

If you don’t have the Canongate edition with O’Farrell’s Introduction, here are my comments.

Reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence, my initial reaction was “WHAAA? What am I reading? Is this a novel, a memoir, a travelogue, litcrit, or one long excuse for procrastination?” In fact, it seems to be all of these mixed together into a simultaneously hilarious, outrageous, erudite book that ignores — no explodes — literary boundaries and categories.

I fantasized that Geoff Dyer or perhaps “Geoff Dyer” and I were friends of long-standing. “Geoff” is about a decade younger and we’ve known each other since he was an exceptionally idiosyncratic and talented student in a graduate seminar that I taught. Back then, “Geoff” was a particular favorite of my very young daughters, who looked forward to his visits with great glee. “Geoff” and I share dinner together every few months. Tonight we met over Singhas and khao soi. My wife begged off, mentioning another commitment — I had my doubts. As always, “Geoff” was wildly amusing. Over our Singhas, he talked of his peregrinations from Paris to Rome to Alonissos to Taormina to Taos to San Francisco and finally back to Dullford, as he calls Oxford; his massive DIY project with his father of building about 200 linear foot of bookshelves for his new apartment (be still, my jealous heart); his disdain for children (don’t tell my daughters, they thought that “Geoff” was the funniest adult in their small world); his depressions (for whatever it’s worth, “Geoff” usually seems oddly buoyant); his plans for his long-promised book on D.H. Lawrence (I mean, like, how many years has “Geoff” been talking about this damn book?); his multiple hypochondrias and ailments (so many that I’ve long since given up trying to separate his ailments from his hypochondria, and I think of him as a one person Munchausen-by-proxy); his great long list of daily annoyances and outrages. “Geoff” being “Geoff”, no disquisition is complete without his somehow weaving in a remarkable array of authors: Lawrence of course, but also Rilke, Nietzsche, Camus, Updike, Hardy, Huxley, Bernhard, and Carey. I returned home after two or three hours to find my my wife sitting comfortably where she was when I left her earlier (I purposefully didn’t ask her what happened to her other “commitment”). She asked m what we talked about and I recounted to her much of my evening with “Geoff”. And then my wife said something like, “In other words, as usual, “Geoff” talked about himself and you listened. Did he ask a single question about yourself? About me? About our daughters who still adore him?” My wife, as usual, was right: “Geoff” is the single most self-absorbed person that I know, with his relentless, manic, crazy self-centeredness made bearable only by his humor, intelligence, and insights. Perhaps next time that I see “Geoff” — and I know that I’ll meet with “Geoff” by myself because my wife will undoubtedly again beg off because of another “commitment” — I’ll limit us to a quick cuppa rather than multiple Singhas.

The charm and the attraction of Out of Sheer Rage partially derives from not knowing whether Geoff or “Geoff” is talking to us; not knowing whether he’s reflecting Lawrence, channeling Lawrence, performing Lawrence, or mind-melding with Lawrence; and not knowing whether he’s ever lived in Paris or Rome, or visited the many places that he name checks. This naïve reader can’t discern the line between Geoff and “Geoff”, just as this reader can’t discern the line between Lawrence himself, Geoff in real life, and Geoff in real life’s fictional “Geoff”. Guessing, constantly guessing, what’s real and what’s imagined, what’s fiction and what’s memoir, what’s scholarship and what’s make-believe: that’s Out of Sheer Rage for me. Yes, I’ve read other books in which an author purposively blurs the line between fiction and memoir, and in which an author inserts an eponymous character. But I’ve never read another book in which the effect is so dizzying, so disorienting, leaving the reader so unmoored and totally unsure of the boundary between truth and fiction. A younger “Dan Friedman” might have enjoyed few entertainments more than sitting around for hours getting stoned with the gloriously, incomparably loony “Geoff Dyer”, bouncing merrily from topic to topic, author to author, place to place.

An author with less humor, less imagination, less erudition, and less literary talent would muck up Out of Sheer Rage, turning it into an indecipherable, enraging mess of a book, perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately frustrating and worthless. But that’s not Dyer at all: Out of Sheer Rage is wildly original, incomparable, inimitable, an occasionally tiresome but ultimately highly satisfying work.

4.5 stars

[نیکزاد نورپناه · Rating 3 out of 5]

گشایش کتاب معرکه بود. هشتاد صفحۀ اول رو یه ضرب خوندم. بشدت خنده داره و این البته برای یه نویسندۀ انگلیسی کیفیت کمیابیه. ساختار کتاب هم جالبه: جف دایر در تلاشه مطلبی یا کتابی بنویسه درباره نویسندۀ مورد علاقه اش یعنی دی اچ لارنس. اما بخاطر انفعال و وسواس و افسردگی و سرگشتگی و مابقی اینجور عوامل موفق نمیشه. این کتاب هم شرحِ نتونستنه. مهم هم نیست که آدم چیزی از لارنس بدونه یا نه. من چندان چیزی از لارنس نخونده بودم و با خوندن مموارِ دایر ترغیب شدم و چندتا شعر از لارنس خوندم و الان هم یه سفرنامه اش رو دست گرفتم. البته ایدۀ ممواری که دایر نوشته بدیع نیست. قبلا هم مشابهش رو خونده بودم. منظورم همین ایده است که نویسنده ای عزم نوشتن کنه و نتونه و بعد دربارۀ همین فرایند نتونستن بنویسه. پیتر هاندکه اقلا دو مورد مشابه داره. اما بهرحال موضوعیه که برای من جالبه. از وسطهای کتاب کمی به نظرم از نفس افتاد. حتی وسواسهای دایر دیگه بامزه نبود. انگار به تکرار افتاده بود. فکر کنم اگه کتاب رو سر صد صفحه جمع و جور کرده بود بمراتب چیز جالبتری میشد. و راستش اصلا فکر میکنم قالب مموار حجم مناسبش همین صد صفحه باشه (استثناش هم خاطرات پس از مرگ شاتوبریان البته). چون داستانی وجود نداره که بخود آدم رو درگیر کنه. این رو مثل نهیبی به خودم هم میگم که دوست دارم مموار بنویسم.

[Jason Coleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stayed home sick from work for a couple days and it gave me the time to finally finish this thing. You know how you're actually kind of happy to be sick for once because you can at least relax. Graham Greene said the only place he could get any peace was in the hospital. But it was at turns a dull and stressful couple of days. Somehow this seemed like about the right state in which to read Dyer's book.

It begins as a sort of lament about indecisiveness: should he work on his study of D.H. Lawrence or on his novel? should he write in an inspiring place like the Mediterranean or in a dull place like his Oxford apartment? should he lug Lawrence's Collected Poems along on his vacation? He chooses to leave the Collected Poems behind, has second thoughts, has it shipped to him, doesn't use it. Dyer has the indecisive-grouch shtick down cold (although Steve Martin's "funniest book I ever read" blurb makes you wonder if he's thinking of a different book). He visits the villa Lawrence rented in Italy and doesn't feel anything; visits Lawrence's childhood home in Nottinghamshire, doesn't feel anything. He may have even ruined for me one of my all-time dreams, summering on a Greek island. The rocky beach is full of snakes, the sea full of jellyfish, wasps swarm every meal; in an unconscious act to relieve the boredom he and his girlfriend crash their moped into a giant rock. They're stuck in bed, recuperating from the wreck. The sex, weirdly enough, is great.

The irony, of course, is that, in explaining why he can't write a Lawrence book, he stumbles into writing a Lawrence book. The asides about Lawrence's life begin to accumulate into a portrait; the way Dyer's own prickly, itinerant existence recalls Lawrence's begins to shed a definite light as well. And on page 120—after half a book of travel stories, ailments, indecision—he gets down to it and shows his hand: he's a death-of-the-novel guy. He confesses that it's the marginalia he loves—Lawrence's notebooks, his letters—not his novels. He tells us the big creative breakthroughs of a hundred or more years ago are finished, that even the greatest contemporary novels' advances are mere increments. "Increasingly the process of novelization goes hand in hand with a strait-jacketing of the material's expressive potential. One gets so weary watching authors' sensations and thoughts get novelized, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression." He's right, I thought, it's over. That "concrete of fiction" remark weighed on me. In the same way he ruined Greek islands for me, he damn near ruined the novel for me. But I break with him when he goes on to include not only contemporary novels, but all novels, Lawrence's novels, because I moved from this book straight to Sons & Lovers, a book I hadn't read since college, and I'm here to tell you it is fucking great.

And that's all I have to say about the book, except this: whatever happened to "Laura"?

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay -- for once, I think I did give this book a fair shot. I actually got about halfway through before abandoning it rather than tossing it aside after 50 pages. I just don't think it's going to change radically in the second half, so why bother?

Which is more self-indulgent: Eat, Pray, Love, or this book?

I am actually among those who enjoyed EPL, although I recognize the criticisms of those goodreaders who called it self-indulgent and narcissistic. I found Elizabeth Gilbert funny and engaging, and her adventures were actually mostly interesting to me. Whatever you want to say about her love interest toward the end of the book, I felt like the romance offered the feel-good closure you get from a pleasant-if-not-too-deep-or-demanding beach novel and I was fine with it.

For me, OOSR felt more like the Shopaholic books. Geoff Dyer is admittedly funny, although his humor is a bit drier and more subtle than Elizabeth Gilbert's. There's some clever intellectualism here which is part of what kept me reading as long as I did. But ultimately? This is a book about a privileged dude whose biggest problem seems to be that he keeps putting off writing his book. He can flit around Europe, no problem, and share his little adventures and mental wanderings and commitment-phobia about his girlfriend with us. But, weep weep, sob sob, he just can't seem to sit down and write his damn book.

Buddy? I don't know who's paying your bills, but it doesn't seem to be you. I have a great cure for procrastination: financial responsibility. When I read the Shopaholic books, which at least don't claim to be anything other than chick-lit, I couldn't help feeling disgusted with Becky as the same joke kept playing itself out over and over and she just kept repeating the same self-destructive behaviors. Like Shopaholic, this book was like watching a slow car accident with the driver refusing to take any initiative to prevent it.

I'm sorry. I know it's judgmental of me, but I just have no patience for this kind of crap. And I certainly don't want to read a whole book about it. If writing a memoir about your search for spiritual fulfillment is self-indulgent, what would you call writing a memoir about your inability (unwillingness?) to get your act together?

I know, I know. I'm judgmental and overly dismissive and anti-intellectual and missing the point and part of the great unwashed (or the minority unwashed, judging from this book's great reception on goodreads) for failing to appreciate this book and simply harping on Dyer's moral failings. What can I tell you, people? I guess that's why I'm reviewing on goodreads and not for the New York Times.

[Al · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's all a matter of expectations (and paying closer attention to the book jacket text). Not that I presumed that this would be a scholarly study of D.H. Lawrence, but I'd hoped it would be ABOUT D.H. Lawrence and not its author Geoff Dyer, specifically Dyer's "crippling indecisiveness" to write a book about D.H. Lawrence. As Dyer admits at one point, "It may be of no interest to anyone--and this entire book, I suspect, is of no interest to anyone...." Midway through "Out of Sheer Rage" Dyer finally starts to focus on Lawrence, chiefly though his letters, as Dyer and his saintly girlfriend Laura travel to various Lawrence haunts like Taos and Oaxaca. And I must admit, Dyer's insights late in the short book are sterling, bringing insight into Lawrence the person, not the legend. Maybe it's better to appreciate this book as a humorous essay on a perpetually procrastinating writer, the sort of neurotic persona that Woody Allen likes to project. If Dyer had spent as much time writing about Lawrence as about his own despair and eczema, it would have been quite a book. Recommended only for fans of Dyer.

[Arlington · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Unless, like Thelma and Louise, you plunge off the side of a canyon, there is no escaping the everyday. What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free. To be free is not the result of a moment's decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed. More than anything else, freedom requires tenaciousness. There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious."

Yep.

Also, best ever description of water running through pipes.

[☄ · Rating 5 out of 5]

a few days ago the local delicatessen had run out of the luxury doughnuts which i have for my elevenses and on which i depend utterly, just as i depend on my cornetti integrali from the farnese when i am in rome. right, i thought to myself, turning on my heel and walking out, grim-faced and tight-lipped, i will return later in the day and burn the place to the ground with all the staff in it – friendly, charming staff, incidentally, who have often let me owe them money – so that they could experience a fraction of the pain that i had suffered by not being able to have my morning doughnut.

this is one of the funniest books i have ever read. geoff dyer is, make no mistake, the most dramatic man alive, and as such it’s fitting he’s chosen lawrence for his subject, who is, somehow, simultaneously, also the most dramatic person who has ever lived. a match made in heaven.

note: this book is flawless. i have never before giggled and groaned so much whilst reading a book, nor looked into a book’s pages and seen, instead of words, so many reflective surfaces. at times while reading i became convinced that it was not geoff dyer who had written this book, after all, but me… which says a lot about me, especially as a writer who is, like dyer, constantly saying, “i can’t take this anymore” whilst staring at the blinking cursor on my word document, having written only 20 excruciating words in the course of two hours, and the end nowhere in sight. he simply gets me. help <3

[Neşet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hevesli olup söyleyecek bir şey bulamamak, düşünceleri toparlayıp bir sonuca bağlayıp yazamamak, ertelemek üzerine bu kimi zaman sevimli çoğu zaman huysuz metin. Geoff Dyer, D.H Lawrence üzerine en ince detayı biliyor, yazarı çözümlüyor ama çoğu şeyi dile getirmek istemiyor, sıkılıyor mesela kitabın bir yerinde Danimarka'ya konuşmak için gidiyor hiçbir şey anlatamadan geri dönüyor. Yazarına göre Anka Kuşu, İtalya'da Alacakaranlık, D.H. Lawrence'ın mektupları, şiirleri en sevdiği eserleri arasındaymış.

[Karina Samyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een biografie? Een autobiografie? Een reisverslag? Een filosofisch werk? Een boek over een schrijver? Over schrijven of niet schrijven? Een beetje van dit alles en dat maakt het boek tot een bijzondere leeservaring. Eén ding is zeker : het is geestig en meermaals zat ik te grinniken. Best interessant.

[Robert Ronsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a columnist in the UK who writes for the The Guardian. His name is Tim Dowling. He is a serial procrastinator and those jobs he does take on don't usually go well. If he succeeds at something he crows about it endlessly until, as he himself predicts, there comes the fall. Did I mention that he's very funny?
Well, Geoff Dyer is Tim Dowling on downers. His shilly-shallying is an art form. His humour is at times laugh out loud but mostly it ripples through the book like an underground stream. Most of the time his writing flows and facilitates easy reading. So far, so four stars.
The trouble is that I don't like books that make me feel stupid and there's something about the way that Dyer uses quotes from Nietzsche, Rilke et al to make his points that makes me feel very stupid indeed. His tortuous self-examination of his motivation for not having motivation engendered in me the sense that I'm not treating life seriously enough by simply getting on with it without analysing every twist and turn. I don't object to intelligence but some people have a way of demonstrating theirs that belittle me and Geoff Dyer is one of them. So three stars.
If the entire book had been written with the simple but brilliant logic of the author's conclusion in the final stunning paragraph I would have given it five stars.
(Mike, if you're reading this, thanks for the recommendation.)