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Dame todo lo que tengas
Dame todo lo que tengas es un exquisito libro de memorias, el diario de un acoso que dura cinco años y que pasa por distintas etapas de destrucción de la persona pública de James Lasdun a través de todas las herramientas digitales, desde un sofisticado discurso de odio que cada vez se hace más burdo y desesperado. En plena vivencia de acoso por parte de una de sus alumnas de Escritura Creativa en Princeton, decide viajar a lugares de culto creados bajo la fuerza del deseo y recordar leyendas, novelas o dramas que sostienen nuestra cultura para entender el mecanismo del deseo no cumplido que nos mueve a querer destruir lo desesado.
En ese diario, James Lasdun se ve atravesado por un conocimiento de sí mismo al que cualquier persona en una situación normal no es capaz de enfrentarse. Se han escrito innumerables textos sobre el deseo y especialmente sobre el deseo en la relación sexual y en todos ellos aparece el juego, que muchas veces tiene que ver con la relación espectral, la de verte en el otro y la de verte a ti mismo y al otro como un espectro.
En ese diario, James Lasdun se ve atravesado por un conocimiento de sí mismo al que cualquier persona en una situación normal no es capaz de enfrentarse. Se han escrito innumerables textos sobre el deseo y especialmente sobre el deseo en la relación sexual y en todos ellos aparece el juego, que muchas veces tiene que ver con la relación espectral, la de verte en el otro y la de verte a ti mismo y al otro como un espectro.
268 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 2013
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2537 people want to read
About the author
James Lasdun
49 books137 followersJames Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He has published two novels as well as several collections of short stories and poetry. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the Los Angeles Times, T. S. Eliot, and Forward prizes in poetry; and he was the winner of the inaugural U.K./BBC Short Story Prize. His nonfiction has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 369 reviews
December 9, 2017
Changing this from 1 to 5 stars, based on the author's writing alone. The few relevant phrases from my original review should explain why quite easily. See below:
"...beautiful writing"
"adored...his cross country train trip, his reflections on D.H. Lawrence, his beautiful retelling of Sir Gawain"
"A genius writer..."
"I loved it and couldn't put it down. My God, what a writer."
**
Obviously, I thought the book was fantastic, but I had some problems with it that I couldn't articulate without going into a goddamn frenzy....
My original review was victim-blaming garbage, and it was mean.
Hate when I do this to amazing authors who have also been victims. Ugh, that's three times now.
Sorry, James, you didn't deserve it.
"...beautiful writing"
"adored...his cross country train trip, his reflections on D.H. Lawrence, his beautiful retelling of Sir Gawain"
"A genius writer..."
"I loved it and couldn't put it down. My God, what a writer."
**
Obviously, I thought the book was fantastic, but I had some problems with it that I couldn't articulate without going into a goddamn frenzy....
My original review was victim-blaming garbage, and it was mean.
Hate when I do this to amazing authors who have also been victims. Ugh, that's three times now.
Sorry, James, you didn't deserve it.
November 23, 2016
Given that this is a true story, it is a horrifying piece of work. Lasdun is forced to relive the moments leading up to and during a verbal online assault on him, his family, his publisher, his employers, and his work by a demented student. An individual has no real protection from defamation, and the problem continued for years, infecting every version of himself as Lasdun twisted and turned, desperate to avoid the slings and arrows…This book was published in 2013. Lasdun met his aggressor in 2003 in a class he taught in New York City. The nightmare began in 2005 when the stalker asked Lasdun to read a finished draft of her novel. He declined.
This account is absolutely dreamlike in places, incomprehensible, seeming like fiction. Who would have the sustained energy for this kind of an vicious assault, and who on earth could withstand its torments? Lasdun recalls the beginning when he met his stalker, and by the time we get to the end of his book, we recognize the insubstantiality of Lasdun’s initial perceptions of her, Nasreen, now the weapon thrust into his personae. He is damaged, psychically.
There is an anti-semitic tone to the harassment, but this reader got the sense that was a kind of blind. Nasreen would like to elevate her attachment to something more momentous than the squirrelly ravings of an insular life. However, Lasdun grasped this language as a way to deflect Nasreen to the larger, more populous “other,” and may, in this way, have found his way to deal with the scourge, the abuse, the flagellation of a deranged mind.
It is an uncomfortable read, no matter how you call it. Anyone who has suffered the indignities of one’s every move, online and off, being tracked and monitored, would be interested to see how bad it can get without an outright murder taking place. Lasdun did everything he could to stop the behaviors by legal means, e.g., documented the email abuse and tracking, notified his employers, called the FBI, requested help from law enforcement, etc. and still the abuse continued. He was instructed not to block the assaults because one might contain an actionable threat to his life, so he had to read and collate them over a period of years, polluting his work life, family life, internal and external life. He was positively persecuted.
Lasdun heroically continues his work, teaching and promoting his novels, writing articles, and at a couple of points in the book makes parallels between books he happens upon and his situation: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a book he picked up on a shelf in the lobby of the hostelry where he stayed at in Taos, New Mexico about Mabel Dodge Luhan and D.H. Lawrence, of Lady Chatterley's Lover fame. The sections of those books that occupied his mind featured married women trying to seduce a visitor, a man. There has got to be a certain amount of sympathy males readers feel for the perplexity and confusion a man would feel in such a situation.
In any case, I am left unclear whether or not the situation was ever resolved, and so feel a certain amount of disappointment that any reader would feel when confronted with an open-ended real life trauma. This trauma in some sense becomes our burden to bear, as blameless individuals trying to connect with others in the world by teaching, writing, traveling, and cannot be laid at the foot of Lasdun. He is simply sharing his experience in hopes the outcomes of the plague, spread widely, would lessen his own illness with it. To murder a man kills him outright. To send poisoned darts into another’s life prolongs the killing, but it is still murder. Murder of peace of mind, of scholarship, of a way of life. I am terribly, terribly sorry for him, for all who suffer so.
This account is absolutely dreamlike in places, incomprehensible, seeming like fiction. Who would have the sustained energy for this kind of an vicious assault, and who on earth could withstand its torments? Lasdun recalls the beginning when he met his stalker, and by the time we get to the end of his book, we recognize the insubstantiality of Lasdun’s initial perceptions of her, Nasreen, now the weapon thrust into his personae. He is damaged, psychically.
There is an anti-semitic tone to the harassment, but this reader got the sense that was a kind of blind. Nasreen would like to elevate her attachment to something more momentous than the squirrelly ravings of an insular life. However, Lasdun grasped this language as a way to deflect Nasreen to the larger, more populous “other,” and may, in this way, have found his way to deal with the scourge, the abuse, the flagellation of a deranged mind.
It is an uncomfortable read, no matter how you call it. Anyone who has suffered the indignities of one’s every move, online and off, being tracked and monitored, would be interested to see how bad it can get without an outright murder taking place. Lasdun did everything he could to stop the behaviors by legal means, e.g., documented the email abuse and tracking, notified his employers, called the FBI, requested help from law enforcement, etc. and still the abuse continued. He was instructed not to block the assaults because one might contain an actionable threat to his life, so he had to read and collate them over a period of years, polluting his work life, family life, internal and external life. He was positively persecuted.
Lasdun heroically continues his work, teaching and promoting his novels, writing articles, and at a couple of points in the book makes parallels between books he happens upon and his situation: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a book he picked up on a shelf in the lobby of the hostelry where he stayed at in Taos, New Mexico about Mabel Dodge Luhan and D.H. Lawrence, of Lady Chatterley's Lover fame. The sections of those books that occupied his mind featured married women trying to seduce a visitor, a man. There has got to be a certain amount of sympathy males readers feel for the perplexity and confusion a man would feel in such a situation.
In any case, I am left unclear whether or not the situation was ever resolved, and so feel a certain amount of disappointment that any reader would feel when confronted with an open-ended real life trauma. This trauma in some sense becomes our burden to bear, as blameless individuals trying to connect with others in the world by teaching, writing, traveling, and cannot be laid at the foot of Lasdun. He is simply sharing his experience in hopes the outcomes of the plague, spread widely, would lessen his own illness with it. To murder a man kills him outright. To send poisoned darts into another’s life prolongs the killing, but it is still murder. Murder of peace of mind, of scholarship, of a way of life. I am terribly, terribly sorry for him, for all who suffer so.
February 6, 2020
[I reread this to compare it with the account self-published by Afarin Majidi, the stalker he refers to as “Nasreen” here. I was slightly less impressed this time around: the technology talk feels outdated, the sections on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and a trip to Israel are less than relevant, and the tone is at times too defensive and self-referential. But the heart of the book – the bewilderment at being a victim of character assassination and the lingering paranoia based on years of harassing e-mails – struck me as being as strong as ever, even though I don’t have the personal parallel to the situation that made it so resonant for me when I revisited the book later in 2013. Also, compared to Majidi, he has a better psychological grasp of himself, and of his stalker. So 4 stars this time averages out to 4.5.]
A riveting, digressive and at times rather terrifying account of a years-long online harassment campaign that left the author shaken and questioning his own character. A memoir so intimately honest, so effortlessly literary, that you will be drawn into the whole unsavory tale – caught up in the emotions classical tragedy induces: terror, pity, but ultimately relief that this nightmare isn’t happening to you.
(And still I wonder, why such virulent hatred for this book on Goodreads? It was one of my top five nonfiction titles of 2013!)
James Lasdun, a British novelist, works as a professor at the New York State Writers’ Institute in Albany. An attentive student he calls “Nasreen” set out to virtually destroy his reputation through stalking and cyber terrorism. Nasreen accused him of plagiarizing her work, showing prejudice against Arab students like herself, and even having her drugged and raped at the magazine office where she worked. On one level, these allegations were utterly ludicrous. But on another, they were often difficult to refute. He was all at once “confronted by something unassuageable and beyond all understanding: a malice that has no real cause or motive but simply is.”
While making an objective presentation of the facts of the five-year stalking attack, Lasdun also gives his story surprising depth and detours – incorporating personal and family history; discussion of the origins of anti-Semitism, via a trip to Jerusalem; and a tour through his literary antecedents, especially D.H. Lawrence, whose New Mexico ranch and shrine (see my article on Literary Grave Hunting) he visited on a train ride across America to an engagement in California.
Throughout, Lasdun ponders the difficulty of truly comprehending another’s point of view; “So much depends on where you begin the story you are trying to tell, which in turn, as far as I can see, depends on whom you happen to like most, or dislike least.” His beautifully introspective style is worth quoting at length:
Lasdun has a few ideas but no firm conclusions. I have never encountered a more powerful psychological battle of wills in nonfiction, and Lasdun’s prose – meticulous, self-examining, and never maudlin – is perfectly matched to the task.
(A shorter version also appeared in an article on the Best Nonfiction Reads of 2013 for Bookkaholic.)
A riveting, digressive and at times rather terrifying account of a years-long online harassment campaign that left the author shaken and questioning his own character. A memoir so intimately honest, so effortlessly literary, that you will be drawn into the whole unsavory tale – caught up in the emotions classical tragedy induces: terror, pity, but ultimately relief that this nightmare isn’t happening to you.
(And still I wonder, why such virulent hatred for this book on Goodreads? It was one of my top five nonfiction titles of 2013!)
James Lasdun, a British novelist, works as a professor at the New York State Writers’ Institute in Albany. An attentive student he calls “Nasreen” set out to virtually destroy his reputation through stalking and cyber terrorism. Nasreen accused him of plagiarizing her work, showing prejudice against Arab students like herself, and even having her drugged and raped at the magazine office where she worked. On one level, these allegations were utterly ludicrous. But on another, they were often difficult to refute. He was all at once “confronted by something unassuageable and beyond all understanding: a malice that has no real cause or motive but simply is.”
While making an objective presentation of the facts of the five-year stalking attack, Lasdun also gives his story surprising depth and detours – incorporating personal and family history; discussion of the origins of anti-Semitism, via a trip to Jerusalem; and a tour through his literary antecedents, especially D.H. Lawrence, whose New Mexico ranch and shrine (see my article on Literary Grave Hunting) he visited on a train ride across America to an engagement in California.
Throughout, Lasdun ponders the difficulty of truly comprehending another’s point of view; “So much depends on where you begin the story you are trying to tell, which in turn, as far as I can see, depends on whom you happen to like most, or dislike least.” His beautifully introspective style is worth quoting at length:
now that the saga has entered its fifth year and I have given up waiting for it to stop, I find myself simply wanting to make sense of it. Why is this happening? What does it mean? I want to understand this tormentor of mine who knows the workings of my mind so intricately and uses them so cleverly to make me suffer. I want, as St Augustine said, ‘to comprehend my comprehender’. I want to know what she thinks she is doing...Why is she devoting so much time and energy to making and pressing and elaborating these accusations? What happened – between us, or to her alone – to make my unremarkable existence matter so much to her?
Lasdun has a few ideas but no firm conclusions. I have never encountered a more powerful psychological battle of wills in nonfiction, and Lasdun’s prose – meticulous, self-examining, and never maudlin – is perfectly matched to the task.
(A shorter version also appeared in an article on the Best Nonfiction Reads of 2013 for Bookkaholic.)
November 22, 2014
I'm adding this so I don't forget it. I'm going to need to let my review simmer for a while. Probably have to get bourbon-buzzed again to try to recapture the brilliant discourse I was laying on my husband about this book the other night.
Okay, so on the one hand, I am trying to sympathize with Lasdun. It seems to me that there’s a slight yet very real danger present in befriending someone that isn’t often acknowledged; Lasdun even includes a helpful George Eliot quote to illustrate: “The last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.” Actions that seem innocuous to some may be fraught with meaning for others; comments that are meant kindly may be taken absolutely the opposite from how they’re intended. One person’s silly flirtation may be the building blocks for another’s obsession. Lasdun seems kind of clueless in retrospect as he highlights all the ways he’s misinterpreted parts of his relationship with Nasreen, but the clues that are there & the situations that he’s misread aren’t so clear cut enough to expect that Nasreen’s alleged reaction should’ve automatically been the outcome.
On the other hand, the more I’ve been trying to write this review, the more I remember little, seemingly inconsequential things that Lasdun says & does & the more they make me angry.
-He says about Tintin: the racist comedy within is “okay . . . because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin’s own, and because it is also largely without malice.” I don’t even know what to make of that one.
-About the detective he attempts to enlist to get Nasreen to stop her hate campaign: “If the world of graduate writing programs, literary agents, freelance editors, publishing deals, intellectual property, and so on was at all mysterious to him, he didn’t show it.” So this NYPD detective might be too dumb to understand what you do for a living?
-When he flips out on some guy in a coffee shop & the guy tells him Sieg Heil: “Perhaps no one else had heard his Sieg Heil or, if they had, had known what to make of it (it’s a peculiarly English put-down, and an antiquated one at that),” but here I am 23 years younger than Lasdun & I was born in Colorado & I know what it means – is there anyone who actually doesn’t get that reference?
Lasdun steals a pinecone from a D.H. Lawrence museum even though patrons are explicitly asked not to do so. He keeps an apartment in the city which he illegally sub-lets (which becomes a point of contention with Nasreen later on) & when the management company finds out & attempts to buy him out rather than punishing him for transgressing on the terms of his lease, he refers to it as the “ignominious surrender agreement” and is upset that he’s not getting more money out of it. He thinks that Goodreads has no system to report abuse, even as he makes unsubstantiated claims that he needs this feature (which exists!) because someone is leaving negative reviews of his books & he alleges that it’s Nasreen (although admittedly, the reviews “Elise” has written do have a lot in common with some of Nasreen’s emails). There’s an entire section which tries & fails to weave together a train trip he took, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight,his role in possibly being profiled as a terrorist along with his Egyptian seatmate, the aforementioned Tintin books he reads to his son, & the hate email campaign that is soon to escalate. “(I record these meanderings purely for the sake of the self-portrait that I am trying to paint here. They were the things that preoccupied me at that particular time.)” Well, okay, but it’s hard to see how any of this is relevant to the story & frankly it’s pretty boring as well. And I know this is all so horribly nitpicky of me, but it’s also indicative, I think, of how this book is just not very good. It’s hard to be sympathetic with someone when they choose to portray themselves so poorly, and honestly, I just kind of don’t like this guy.
Mostly I think the main reason I don’t like this book is because it reminds me too much of the time that T got all stressed out about negative Yelp reviews about her Blackjack Pizza store. “You are what the Web says you are, and if it misrepresents you, the feeling of outrage, of anguish, of having been violated in some elemental layer of your existence is, as I began to learn, peculiarly crushing.” Maybe if I was a Googleable presence on the Internet I’d be more aghast at Lasdun’s plight. Does anyone read an Amazon review of a book wherein some reviewer thinks the author, “ . . . may have a penchant for sadism,” & then immediately clutch their pearls & declare the author to be a beast among men or do most of us just assume that we’re using the Internet? & that sort of aimless vitriol is par for the course as well as mostly totally unsubstantiated? While the staggering mass of hate mail he receives during the course of five years (and continuing to this day) must be paralyzing, most of Lasdun’s problems may’ve been solved by if he’d simply changed his email address, or if he’d gone all Captain Awkward & started immediately forwarding emails from Nasreen to a separate folder & simply not reading any of it. I find that I have more sympathy for his agent & her editor friend that get in the crossfire.
Okay, so on the one hand, I am trying to sympathize with Lasdun. It seems to me that there’s a slight yet very real danger present in befriending someone that isn’t often acknowledged; Lasdun even includes a helpful George Eliot quote to illustrate: “The last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.” Actions that seem innocuous to some may be fraught with meaning for others; comments that are meant kindly may be taken absolutely the opposite from how they’re intended. One person’s silly flirtation may be the building blocks for another’s obsession. Lasdun seems kind of clueless in retrospect as he highlights all the ways he’s misinterpreted parts of his relationship with Nasreen, but the clues that are there & the situations that he’s misread aren’t so clear cut enough to expect that Nasreen’s alleged reaction should’ve automatically been the outcome.
On the other hand, the more I’ve been trying to write this review, the more I remember little, seemingly inconsequential things that Lasdun says & does & the more they make me angry.
-He says about Tintin: the racist comedy within is “okay . . . because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin’s own, and because it is also largely without malice.” I don’t even know what to make of that one.
-About the detective he attempts to enlist to get Nasreen to stop her hate campaign: “If the world of graduate writing programs, literary agents, freelance editors, publishing deals, intellectual property, and so on was at all mysterious to him, he didn’t show it.” So this NYPD detective might be too dumb to understand what you do for a living?
-When he flips out on some guy in a coffee shop & the guy tells him Sieg Heil: “Perhaps no one else had heard his Sieg Heil or, if they had, had known what to make of it (it’s a peculiarly English put-down, and an antiquated one at that),” but here I am 23 years younger than Lasdun & I was born in Colorado & I know what it means – is there anyone who actually doesn’t get that reference?
Lasdun steals a pinecone from a D.H. Lawrence museum even though patrons are explicitly asked not to do so. He keeps an apartment in the city which he illegally sub-lets (which becomes a point of contention with Nasreen later on) & when the management company finds out & attempts to buy him out rather than punishing him for transgressing on the terms of his lease, he refers to it as the “ignominious surrender agreement” and is upset that he’s not getting more money out of it. He thinks that Goodreads has no system to report abuse, even as he makes unsubstantiated claims that he needs this feature (which exists!) because someone is leaving negative reviews of his books & he alleges that it’s Nasreen (although admittedly, the reviews “Elise” has written do have a lot in common with some of Nasreen’s emails). There’s an entire section which tries & fails to weave together a train trip he took, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight,his role in possibly being profiled as a terrorist along with his Egyptian seatmate, the aforementioned Tintin books he reads to his son, & the hate email campaign that is soon to escalate. “(I record these meanderings purely for the sake of the self-portrait that I am trying to paint here. They were the things that preoccupied me at that particular time.)” Well, okay, but it’s hard to see how any of this is relevant to the story & frankly it’s pretty boring as well. And I know this is all so horribly nitpicky of me, but it’s also indicative, I think, of how this book is just not very good. It’s hard to be sympathetic with someone when they choose to portray themselves so poorly, and honestly, I just kind of don’t like this guy.
Mostly I think the main reason I don’t like this book is because it reminds me too much of the time that T got all stressed out about negative Yelp reviews about her Blackjack Pizza store. “You are what the Web says you are, and if it misrepresents you, the feeling of outrage, of anguish, of having been violated in some elemental layer of your existence is, as I began to learn, peculiarly crushing.” Maybe if I was a Googleable presence on the Internet I’d be more aghast at Lasdun’s plight. Does anyone read an Amazon review of a book wherein some reviewer thinks the author, “ . . . may have a penchant for sadism,” & then immediately clutch their pearls & declare the author to be a beast among men or do most of us just assume that we’re using the Internet? & that sort of aimless vitriol is par for the course as well as mostly totally unsubstantiated? While the staggering mass of hate mail he receives during the course of five years (and continuing to this day) must be paralyzing, most of Lasdun’s problems may’ve been solved by if he’d simply changed his email address, or if he’d gone all Captain Awkward & started immediately forwarding emails from Nasreen to a separate folder & simply not reading any of it. I find that I have more sympathy for his agent & her editor friend that get in the crossfire.
January 20, 2015
This is a disturbing story of cyberstalking. Lasdun was a fiction professor who was "verbally terrorized" by a former student, called Nasreen, who became obsessed with him and vowed to ruin his life. Not only did she threaten him and his family, sometimes using anti-Semitic language, but she also threatened his publisher, his colleagues and other writers.
Nasreen also made scathing accusations against him, posting hateful comments on Amazon, Goodreads and magazines where Lasdun published his work. Lasdun sought help from the FBI and police, but learned that law enforcement has trouble cracking down on this kind of online harassment.
Lasdun is a good writer and his narrative is compelling, but I grew tired of his long tangents and thought the book needed some serious editing. I think this is one of those stories that works best as a long magazine piece, instead of as a 200-page book.
My rating: 2.5 stars rounded up to 3
Nasreen also made scathing accusations against him, posting hateful comments on Amazon, Goodreads and magazines where Lasdun published his work. Lasdun sought help from the FBI and police, but learned that law enforcement has trouble cracking down on this kind of online harassment.
Lasdun is a good writer and his narrative is compelling, but I grew tired of his long tangents and thought the book needed some serious editing. I think this is one of those stories that works best as a long magazine piece, instead of as a 200-page book.
My rating: 2.5 stars rounded up to 3
August 16, 2013
This reads more like an attempt to clear the author's name than the exploration of the psychology and mechanics of stalking in the modern age that I was hoping for.
Lasdun conspicuously avoids telling the reader if he was attracted to Nasreen when they first met. And the way he sort of internally recognizes and enjoys Nasreen's flirtation and romantic feelings, while outwardly ignoring them... I've done that before. When I started receiving post-rejection nasty emails and floods of texts and instant messages, I now realize it was partially my fault for willfully ignoring another person's feelings. I even went as far as to tell this girl she had a personality disorder. I made terrible, terrible mistakes. Even when Lasdun expresses guilt over his possible missteps in his early interaction with Nasreen, he compares himself to Gawain, a knight (!) who is just too noble to forgive himself even when he has atoned for his sins and everyone around him is congratulating him and assuring there is nothing to be forgiven. I mean, come on. It's like he wants points for taking responsibility while absolving himself of all responsibility.
He also tries to make the reader, at least me, feel like any doubt I might have in his 'scruple' (Lasdun really likes that word... he also likes the word 'interseting' quite a bit, which is a personal peeve of mine... just wanted to throw that in this review somewhere) is a product of Nasreen's litany of hate. He repeats himself a lot, and one things he really tries to drive home is that the outlandishness of Nasreen's emails ignited a noble but erroneous bit of human nature which always leaves space for the benefit of the doubt. "Oh dear reader, you are so sweet for giving this Nasreen woman a chance, but, you see, it's only because you don't realize how your mind is betraying you."
And then there is the lengthy account of the trip to Jerusalem. I kept finding myself with the feeling you get when you walk into a room and you're like "Ok, I walked in here for a reason, but I can not for the life of me remember why". Israel-Palestinian politics are 'interesting', but I kinda wanted read a book about stalking? Lasdun would tie it back to Nasreen once in a while but....
Also, he describers himself as 'impeccably liberal' several times. Which is a really questionable way to describe yourself. Especially given that he goes on to outline some really not-liberal views. Like when he tells us he reads Tintin to his son (red flag #1) in a fake Chinese accent when it's called for, hence 'The Blue Lotus' becomes 'The Brue Rotus' (I almost put the book aside at this point) and even though he recognizes the racist caricatures of Tintin, it's ok because they were done without 'malicious intent'. Seriously? Anyone who has taken any time to educate themselves in modern rhetoric of racial issues would see the glaring errors... I've read dozens of articles and blog posts that dissect that logic and dump the remaining shreds in a big ol' biohazard container. After that, I lost faith in Lasdun as someone who can examine himself successfully and finished the book out of morbid curiosity. He also talks about the 'offended woman' trope of Greek mythology, and how splashing their offenders is a symbol of sexual arousal quickly followed by hurt pride... uh, what? Maybe they just don't like having some dude peeking in on their shower? AND. His complaint that men were being victimized by a growing number of women who cry 'rape' as a way of getting revenge, and that men are taking that place a life-depending-on-repuation-of-sexual-innocence that women 'once' occupied is... it strays into men's rights territory, and really, how could I take his analysis of this situation at face value after that?
By the time I finished this book, I realized that at best it was a final attempt to clear his name for good, and far from the exploration of the psychology of stalking I wanted to read. Lasdun acknowledges what he is doing may be inappropriate, and, I have to say it is. As much as this book may help clear his name, it feels like personal gossip at best, and defamation at worst. I'm sure Nasreen did some really unpleasant things, but writing a book about it feel more like upping the ante than anything.
Lasdun conspicuously avoids telling the reader if he was attracted to Nasreen when they first met. And the way he sort of internally recognizes and enjoys Nasreen's flirtation and romantic feelings, while outwardly ignoring them... I've done that before. When I started receiving post-rejection nasty emails and floods of texts and instant messages, I now realize it was partially my fault for willfully ignoring another person's feelings. I even went as far as to tell this girl she had a personality disorder. I made terrible, terrible mistakes. Even when Lasdun expresses guilt over his possible missteps in his early interaction with Nasreen, he compares himself to Gawain, a knight (!) who is just too noble to forgive himself even when he has atoned for his sins and everyone around him is congratulating him and assuring there is nothing to be forgiven. I mean, come on. It's like he wants points for taking responsibility while absolving himself of all responsibility.
He also tries to make the reader, at least me, feel like any doubt I might have in his 'scruple' (Lasdun really likes that word... he also likes the word 'interseting' quite a bit, which is a personal peeve of mine... just wanted to throw that in this review somewhere) is a product of Nasreen's litany of hate. He repeats himself a lot, and one things he really tries to drive home is that the outlandishness of Nasreen's emails ignited a noble but erroneous bit of human nature which always leaves space for the benefit of the doubt. "Oh dear reader, you are so sweet for giving this Nasreen woman a chance, but, you see, it's only because you don't realize how your mind is betraying you."
And then there is the lengthy account of the trip to Jerusalem. I kept finding myself with the feeling you get when you walk into a room and you're like "Ok, I walked in here for a reason, but I can not for the life of me remember why". Israel-Palestinian politics are 'interesting', but I kinda wanted read a book about stalking? Lasdun would tie it back to Nasreen once in a while but....
Also, he describers himself as 'impeccably liberal' several times. Which is a really questionable way to describe yourself. Especially given that he goes on to outline some really not-liberal views. Like when he tells us he reads Tintin to his son (red flag #1) in a fake Chinese accent when it's called for, hence 'The Blue Lotus' becomes 'The Brue Rotus' (I almost put the book aside at this point) and even though he recognizes the racist caricatures of Tintin, it's ok because they were done without 'malicious intent'. Seriously? Anyone who has taken any time to educate themselves in modern rhetoric of racial issues would see the glaring errors... I've read dozens of articles and blog posts that dissect that logic and dump the remaining shreds in a big ol' biohazard container. After that, I lost faith in Lasdun as someone who can examine himself successfully and finished the book out of morbid curiosity. He also talks about the 'offended woman' trope of Greek mythology, and how splashing their offenders is a symbol of sexual arousal quickly followed by hurt pride... uh, what? Maybe they just don't like having some dude peeking in on their shower? AND. His complaint that men were being victimized by a growing number of women who cry 'rape' as a way of getting revenge, and that men are taking that place a life-depending-on-repuation-of-sexual-innocence that women 'once' occupied is... it strays into men's rights territory, and really, how could I take his analysis of this situation at face value after that?
By the time I finished this book, I realized that at best it was a final attempt to clear his name for good, and far from the exploration of the psychology of stalking I wanted to read. Lasdun acknowledges what he is doing may be inappropriate, and, I have to say it is. As much as this book may help clear his name, it feels like personal gossip at best, and defamation at worst. I'm sure Nasreen did some really unpleasant things, but writing a book about it feel more like upping the ante than anything.
April 24, 2013
This book left me feeling unsettled, but not for the reason I thought it would. The stalking of James Lasdun, though by all accounts horrible, unpleasant, professionally and personally damaging, and undeserved seemed to be more of a vehicle for the novel or memoir that Lasdun wanted to write but for whatever reason, was unable to. We get hints of it throughout the book: his father as an architect, his life as a teacher, a visit to the Western Wall in which he attempts to "reconcile" with or connect with his Jewish identity - but these fragments seem out of place, altogether unrelated to his stalking, and frankly, tough to get through.
I once had a literary teacher tell me, "I don't give a shit that you think you "saw yourself" in "Anna Karenina."" This is probably some of the best advice I've gotten in terms of literary analysis, and it's some advice I wish Lasdun had gotten as well. How many more veiled (haha, for those who have read the book) references and incomprehensible literary connections do we have to sit through before we can get back to the stalking, which is why we all bought the book in the first place, and, presumably, why Lasdun wrote it? Not as many people would be ready to read a sort of walk-through of Lasdun's literary journals, we've already gotten a dozen essays on Franzen in that vein and none of them were as helpful or as pleasant as his simple curation of a table of books at The Strand. If I wanted to know Lasdun's favorite books, I would have combed through some of his interviews, all of which recently, again misleadingly, seem to represent the book as being about his stalking.
This book troubled me for many reasons. I feel awfully for him, no one should have to endure stalking, and having been through it in a different form (in which the person, terrifyingly, did show up in person) I can attest to its unpleasantness, and the feeling of resigned hopelessness that Lasdun does capture well. But, since the book wasn't as "Nasreen-heavy" as I had wanted (in a sort of Michael Haneke way where we are have a macabre curiosity to read, see, or listen to horrible things happening to other people) I had to wonder why he really wrote it. Doubtless Lasdun acknowledges several times throughout the book that the writing of it could have double as many negative effects as any positive cathartic ones, but I can't help but wonder if the book was written as, in the same circle as many "misery lit" memoirs, a kind of insurance policy. At the risk of sounding like a Nasreen-minded conspiracy theorist, I have to wonder: could he really not have seen where this was going? Why didn't he stop it earlier? Is all really as he said it is? I don't see Lasdun actively encouraging emails once they got to a clearly insane point, but I don't see him actively discouraging them before they got to that point either. And the chronic questioner in me has to ask if he only wrote this book to acknowledge his abuse, and to if not stop, at least address the smear campaign? Perhaps it's the weakness of the narrative and bizarre plot structure that makes me think so. I've written argumentative essays where I've gotten halfway through, realized that I actually didn't have as much to say as I thought I did and that my points aren't particularly strong, and yet plodded on in a stubborn attempt to prove myself right, or at least see the project through to the end. That's what this book felt like for me.
I once had a literary teacher tell me, "I don't give a shit that you think you "saw yourself" in "Anna Karenina."" This is probably some of the best advice I've gotten in terms of literary analysis, and it's some advice I wish Lasdun had gotten as well. How many more veiled (haha, for those who have read the book) references and incomprehensible literary connections do we have to sit through before we can get back to the stalking, which is why we all bought the book in the first place, and, presumably, why Lasdun wrote it? Not as many people would be ready to read a sort of walk-through of Lasdun's literary journals, we've already gotten a dozen essays on Franzen in that vein and none of them were as helpful or as pleasant as his simple curation of a table of books at The Strand. If I wanted to know Lasdun's favorite books, I would have combed through some of his interviews, all of which recently, again misleadingly, seem to represent the book as being about his stalking.
This book troubled me for many reasons. I feel awfully for him, no one should have to endure stalking, and having been through it in a different form (in which the person, terrifyingly, did show up in person) I can attest to its unpleasantness, and the feeling of resigned hopelessness that Lasdun does capture well. But, since the book wasn't as "Nasreen-heavy" as I had wanted (in a sort of Michael Haneke way where we are have a macabre curiosity to read, see, or listen to horrible things happening to other people) I had to wonder why he really wrote it. Doubtless Lasdun acknowledges several times throughout the book that the writing of it could have double as many negative effects as any positive cathartic ones, but I can't help but wonder if the book was written as, in the same circle as many "misery lit" memoirs, a kind of insurance policy. At the risk of sounding like a Nasreen-minded conspiracy theorist, I have to wonder: could he really not have seen where this was going? Why didn't he stop it earlier? Is all really as he said it is? I don't see Lasdun actively encouraging emails once they got to a clearly insane point, but I don't see him actively discouraging them before they got to that point either. And the chronic questioner in me has to ask if he only wrote this book to acknowledge his abuse, and to if not stop, at least address the smear campaign? Perhaps it's the weakness of the narrative and bizarre plot structure that makes me think so. I've written argumentative essays where I've gotten halfway through, realized that I actually didn't have as much to say as I thought I did and that my points aren't particularly strong, and yet plodded on in a stubborn attempt to prove myself right, or at least see the project through to the end. That's what this book felt like for me.
May 5, 2025
3 Stars = It was okay.
I'm very sorry that the author, or anyone, has had the experience of being stalked. What a terrible way to rip someone's life apart.
I know many people love the author's writing in this book. Maybe I'm just not a sophisticated enough reader. *shrugs* But as I was reading it felt like the author had a big shovel, and was just raking every thought that went through his head, regarding the stalking, onto the page. To me, the book was mostly a stream of consciousness, or navel gazing, or something! I was expecting a true crime memoir, and this book is about a horrible cyber stalking attack on the author that lasted for years, but he spends 75% on his tangents, and only about 25% on what actually took place.
After finishing the book, I did a bit of research, and in an interview he said the stalking had finally stopped. https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_s...
I'm very sorry that the author, or anyone, has had the experience of being stalked. What a terrible way to rip someone's life apart.
I know many people love the author's writing in this book. Maybe I'm just not a sophisticated enough reader. *shrugs* But as I was reading it felt like the author had a big shovel, and was just raking every thought that went through his head, regarding the stalking, onto the page. To me, the book was mostly a stream of consciousness, or navel gazing, or something! I was expecting a true crime memoir, and this book is about a horrible cyber stalking attack on the author that lasted for years, but he spends 75% on his tangents, and only about 25% on what actually took place.
After finishing the book, I did a bit of research, and in an interview he said the stalking had finally stopped. https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_s...
August 8, 2018
the best book to tell what it means to be stalked in the internet
January 31, 2019
I first read this book back in 2013. I had a great deal of sympathy for the author, as I had four creepy men oozing their way around the outskirts of my life at that time and I was struggling to cope with the situation. Fortunately for me, none of them was nearly as persistent or proactive as the woman who troubled Mr. Lasdun.
On re-reading this volume, I was struck by two things. First, that the events in this book took place before we were really familiar with things like public shaming on the internet, revenge porn, and GamerGate and so many other attacks on people’s reputations in cyberspace. It’s taken a long time to get police interested in pursuing physical stalkers and their assistance has extremely mixed results, so I’m unsurprised that this author couldn’t get them effectively interested in his predicament.
Second, I have to point out that I don’t think this book wouldn’t have been deemed worthy of publishing if the author had been female. Women have to put up with this kind of behaviour with very little help from authorities on a regular basis. The reason that this book was “news” was because the victim was male and that character assassination on the internet was a new-ish thing.
I’m pleased to report that all four of the creepy men in my 2013 life are history. I don’t know where a single one of them is and I’m happy that way. Stalking is about power, having the power to make someone else’s life miserable while trying to get them to conform to some fantasy.
For observations on the stalking phenomenon, I would recommend Obsession by John E. Douglas (former FBI agent). For advice on keeping yourself safe, I would advise reading The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin De Becker.
On re-reading this volume, I was struck by two things. First, that the events in this book took place before we were really familiar with things like public shaming on the internet, revenge porn, and GamerGate and so many other attacks on people’s reputations in cyberspace. It’s taken a long time to get police interested in pursuing physical stalkers and their assistance has extremely mixed results, so I’m unsurprised that this author couldn’t get them effectively interested in his predicament.
Second, I have to point out that I don’t think this book wouldn’t have been deemed worthy of publishing if the author had been female. Women have to put up with this kind of behaviour with very little help from authorities on a regular basis. The reason that this book was “news” was because the victim was male and that character assassination on the internet was a new-ish thing.
I’m pleased to report that all four of the creepy men in my 2013 life are history. I don’t know where a single one of them is and I’m happy that way. Stalking is about power, having the power to make someone else’s life miserable while trying to get them to conform to some fantasy.
For observations on the stalking phenomenon, I would recommend Obsession by John E. Douglas (former FBI agent). For advice on keeping yourself safe, I would advise reading The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin De Becker.
July 6, 2017
What a waste of a good intellect. The author is so bright yet staggeringly clueless about what he did to exacerbate the stalking situation, and I did not enjoy his pointless mind trips about the nature of anti-semitism and how stalking is depicted in literature. If he spent just a fraction of his efforts looking inside himself to explore how he not only failed to discourage the stalker, how he missed countless opportunities to nip the situation in the bud, it might have been more enjoyable to read, but he seems to have learned absolutely nothing from the experience. In fact he shows such a desperate need to be understood and liked and accepted that I believe he unwittingly encouraged the transformation of this neurotically obsessive student into a screaming nutcase. His repeated refusal, or inability, to stop her behavior and draw the line was maddening.
October 20, 2017
This account of the cyber-terrorist attack on a writer by his former pupil sounded such an interesting read. As a former victim or stalking I really find it therapeutic to read accounts from other people, and have done so for years. Fascinating to see how differently stalkers operate on their victims. But sadly the author seemed more interested in rambling about completely pointless and unconnected stories than about focusing fully on what happened to him. I would say roughly that the book is 25-30% stalking situation and 65-70% stories of the author's travels around the world and his thoughts on terrorism. A let down.
December 15, 2017
[UPDATE - Four-plus years after reading this book and posting this review I received an unexpected comment. In case it's not still there when you, fellow Goodreader, happen upon this, here is the link to which it directed me: https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/writing-and-madness-in-a-time-of-terror-afarin-majidi/1127631208?ean=2940158864254. Just wanted to leave this here.]
It feels disingenuous somehow to give such a low rating to a book written by a man who is still being cyber-stalked by his former student 5+ years on, but I can't in good conscience rate it any higher. At some points I toyed with the notion of a one-star review; that's how infuriating I found many of Lasdun's sharp right turns away from his genuinely disturbing interactions with Nasreen. As other reviewers have said, there's no way this ought to have been well over 200 pages in length; a substantial New Yorker article, without the ill-fitting and occasionally bizarre tangents into Sir Gawain, biblical allegory, cross-country train trips, and his late father's architectural career, would have sufficed.
This book desperately needs another pass or two by an editor so the narrative can be tightened. Voyeuristic though it may be, most people who pick it up are doing so because they're drawn in by the "professor's life ruined by an obsessed student" story the title more than implies. That is not, however, what we got, at least not for more than maybe a third of the memoir. And that's a shame. Had Lasdun focused more exclusively on Nasreen's emails and less on his attempts to tie his experience (weakly) to various literary works and fables, before veering into a series of travelogue-type segments that last for dozens of pages and take us from Provence to Jerusalem to London to the American midwest and back (seriously!), this would've been an account so chilling no reader could have put it down. Alas.
It doesn't help matters that Lasdun comes off as pretentious at best in some parts (the afterthought self-deprecation is unconvincing) and downright unlikable in others (outrage over rude café dwellers, aggravation at being found out as illegally subletting his precious rent-controlled Manhattan digs, skepticism at first meeting over whether a detective can grasp the workings of Lasdun's literary world...and let us not get started on his massive blind spots in terms of what role he may have played in the early escalation of Nasreen's focus on him), but perhaps that's just my read of him. Lasdun did not and does not deserve what he's had flung at him for so long, and I feel bad for him, his family, and his besmirched colleagues. But I also wanted to like him, and wanted to love the book. Neither was possible.
Any way you slice it, "On Being Stalked" is decidedly not as advertised. Lasdun's obvious skill as a writer gets lost in too many untidy forays into giving us everything he has *except* the gory details of his stalking experience. More's the pity.
It feels disingenuous somehow to give such a low rating to a book written by a man who is still being cyber-stalked by his former student 5+ years on, but I can't in good conscience rate it any higher. At some points I toyed with the notion of a one-star review; that's how infuriating I found many of Lasdun's sharp right turns away from his genuinely disturbing interactions with Nasreen. As other reviewers have said, there's no way this ought to have been well over 200 pages in length; a substantial New Yorker article, without the ill-fitting and occasionally bizarre tangents into Sir Gawain, biblical allegory, cross-country train trips, and his late father's architectural career, would have sufficed.
This book desperately needs another pass or two by an editor so the narrative can be tightened. Voyeuristic though it may be, most people who pick it up are doing so because they're drawn in by the "professor's life ruined by an obsessed student" story the title more than implies. That is not, however, what we got, at least not for more than maybe a third of the memoir. And that's a shame. Had Lasdun focused more exclusively on Nasreen's emails and less on his attempts to tie his experience (weakly) to various literary works and fables, before veering into a series of travelogue-type segments that last for dozens of pages and take us from Provence to Jerusalem to London to the American midwest and back (seriously!), this would've been an account so chilling no reader could have put it down. Alas.
It doesn't help matters that Lasdun comes off as pretentious at best in some parts (the afterthought self-deprecation is unconvincing) and downright unlikable in others (outrage over rude café dwellers, aggravation at being found out as illegally subletting his precious rent-controlled Manhattan digs, skepticism at first meeting over whether a detective can grasp the workings of Lasdun's literary world...and let us not get started on his massive blind spots in terms of what role he may have played in the early escalation of Nasreen's focus on him), but perhaps that's just my read of him. Lasdun did not and does not deserve what he's had flung at him for so long, and I feel bad for him, his family, and his besmirched colleagues. But I also wanted to like him, and wanted to love the book. Neither was possible.
Any way you slice it, "On Being Stalked" is decidedly not as advertised. Lasdun's obvious skill as a writer gets lost in too many untidy forays into giving us everything he has *except* the gory details of his stalking experience. More's the pity.
May 9, 2013
Ugh. If you're in the mood for a rambling narrative full of self praise and the author's own endless attempts to prove his intelligence, with a story that really goes...nowhere, this is the book for you. I'm troubled, too, by the lack of the author's own emails. We see many excerpts from Nasreen's emails, but few (if any) of the author's own. Instead, he tells us what he wrote to her, but doesn't provide the proof. It's a quick read, made quicker by the fact that you can skip dozens of pages at a time without missing a beat. Most of the book isn't even about stalking. I do not recommend.
September 8, 2013
I'm only halfway through this book but I have very strong thoughts and opinions concerning the hundred or so pages that I have read.
Let me begin...
This is a manual on how NOT to write a memoir.
This is also a good example on how you shouldn't rebuild your reputation if your good name is besmirched. For that, try google. Google probably has much better tips than James Lasdun's sad attempt at vindicating himself.
I'll tell you what this book is actually about. This is a book on how to make your readers despise you more than your alleged stalker. This is a book on how to identify blatant racism and sexism in a self-proclaimed liberal who denies being racist and sexist. This is how you shouldn't lay out your most embarrassing thoughts, desires, and actions to your readers in an attempt to sway them to your side. Granted, at this point in the book, I do not care for Lasdun, or even Nasreen's attacks on Lasdun, for that matter. Destroying someone's reputation through lies and falsehoods is generally not a nice thing to do (and many would advise against it on moral and ethical grounds), but trying to fix your broken reputation by unintentionally telling the public how much of a terrible person you are is probably not the best way to go about it either.
I don't know if Lasdun lacks self-awareness or if he's just being sarcastic and self-deprecating. (I would like to think the latter, but I doubt that was his intention.) Reviewers keep mentioning how he is self-aware, but when it comes to issues such as racism and sexism, he is the very antithesis of self-awareness.
Take the Tintin episode for example. This is, and I'm not joking, a direct quote from his memoir: (after his son quotes a line from Tintin)
I want to repeat that last line again: "I have felt obliged to talk about this with my son, explaining to him that the comedy is okay only because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin's own, and because it is also largely without malice."
I don't know, bro. Maybe look up casual racism and its effects? Since you teach at colleges, maybe enroll in a sociology course or two. I'm sure you'll get a discount for being a faculty member. Or you can google and wiki these topics, since that's what you like to do.
This isn't the only incident that caught my attention.
Lasdun describes an episode where he's sitting next to an Egyptian man on the train. Lasdun has just read an article on the New York Times about the terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki. When the Egyptian man picks up his cell phone and starts talking in Egyptian Arabic, Lasdun writes about how he associates the man's speech with the article on the terrorist.
Why would you admit these things, and worse yet, publish them?
And then, there is the entire problem of how Lasdun views Nasreen. No, I'm not talking about how she's a malicious stalker out to destroy his reputation through every means possible via the internet. I'm talking about how he views Nasreen as the "corniest archetype of demure Middle Eastern womanhood as concocted in the Western male psyche." He doesn't even bother to deconstruct his viewpoints, instead he goes on and on about Nasreen being Middle Eastern (more specifically Iranian), and he attaches every known stereotype to her identity.
Here is another example: "I, as an Anglo-American Jew, a family man, a published author, a middle-aged male in a position of power (at least from her perspective), was the axis of, shall we say, "virtue," while she, in her own mind at least, was the lone jihadi."
Not only is he racist when it comes to Nasreen, he also holds sexist views concerning her as a woman. This guy just does not understand women, it seems like. Whenever he mentions Nasreen, his prose is littered with impressions of how women are seemingly different just because they are women. It reads worse than a teenage boy trying to understand the concept of girls, women, and female sexuality. (Protip: Women are not a concept.) Lasdun is pretty much a living and breathing example of a Nice Guy™.
I will admit that I did find some parts of his memoir tolerable, and even enjoyable. His thoughts on being a writer strike a chord with me. His descriptions during his travels and his musings (when they're not sexist or racist) are very introspective. I think these are the only things that are keeping me going. At this point, I barely even care about the whole Nasreen episode. That seems more like a subplot compared to all the other things that he writes about. I would've even given one or two of his novels a go if I wasn't so disgusted by his hyperinflated sense of self or his intolerable viewpoints.
I'm not sure if this entire memoir was written to make Lasdum himself more popular than he actually is. He admits that he has a modest readership. I feel like all he wants out of this stalking episode is to make a quick buck and make his name more well known to the general public and entice potential readers. And if this is so, this probably wasn't the smartest way to go about it.
I'm glad I borrowed this book from the library. I'll keep my money, thanks. Or better yet, spend it on an author more deserving of critique, praise, or criticism. I've already wasted enough words on James Lasdun to last a lifetime.
Poor guy will probably read this review and think I'm Nasreen. But really though, who the fuck cares at this point? Grow the fuck up, dude.
Let me begin...
This is a manual on how NOT to write a memoir.
This is also a good example on how you shouldn't rebuild your reputation if your good name is besmirched. For that, try google. Google probably has much better tips than James Lasdun's sad attempt at vindicating himself.
I'll tell you what this book is actually about. This is a book on how to make your readers despise you more than your alleged stalker. This is a book on how to identify blatant racism and sexism in a self-proclaimed liberal who denies being racist and sexist. This is how you shouldn't lay out your most embarrassing thoughts, desires, and actions to your readers in an attempt to sway them to your side. Granted, at this point in the book, I do not care for Lasdun, or even Nasreen's attacks on Lasdun, for that matter. Destroying someone's reputation through lies and falsehoods is generally not a nice thing to do (and many would advise against it on moral and ethical grounds), but trying to fix your broken reputation by unintentionally telling the public how much of a terrible person you are is probably not the best way to go about it either.
I don't know if Lasdun lacks self-awareness or if he's just being sarcastic and self-deprecating. (I would like to think the latter, but I doubt that was his intention.) Reviewers keep mentioning how he is self-aware, but when it comes to issues such as racism and sexism, he is the very antithesis of self-awareness.
Take the Tintin episode for example. This is, and I'm not joking, a direct quote from his memoir: (after his son quotes a line from Tintin)
"It comes from our favorite Tintin book, The Blue Lotus, or, as I have somehow permitted myself to call it, The Brue Rotus; regressing, in my son's company, to the soft racism that pervaded the world of my own childhood, where nobody thought twice about mimicking foreign accents for a cheap laugh. The Tintin books, being all about encounters with foreigners, encourage this kind of low humor when it comes to reading them aloud. They contain a great deal of the comic racial stereotyping characteristic of their time. Being of my own time, I have felt obliged to talk about this with my son, explaining to him that the comedy is okay only because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin's own, and because it is also largely without malice."
I want to repeat that last line again: "I have felt obliged to talk about this with my son, explaining to him that the comedy is okay only because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin's own, and because it is also largely without malice."
I don't know, bro. Maybe look up casual racism and its effects? Since you teach at colleges, maybe enroll in a sociology course or two. I'm sure you'll get a discount for being a faculty member. Or you can google and wiki these topics, since that's what you like to do.
This isn't the only incident that caught my attention.
Lasdun describes an episode where he's sitting next to an Egyptian man on the train. Lasdun has just read an article on the New York Times about the terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki. When the Egyptian man picks up his cell phone and starts talking in Egyptian Arabic, Lasdun writes about how he associates the man's speech with the article on the terrorist.
Why would you admit these things, and worse yet, publish them?
And then, there is the entire problem of how Lasdun views Nasreen. No, I'm not talking about how she's a malicious stalker out to destroy his reputation through every means possible via the internet. I'm talking about how he views Nasreen as the "corniest archetype of demure Middle Eastern womanhood as concocted in the Western male psyche." He doesn't even bother to deconstruct his viewpoints, instead he goes on and on about Nasreen being Middle Eastern (more specifically Iranian), and he attaches every known stereotype to her identity.
Here is another example: "I, as an Anglo-American Jew, a family man, a published author, a middle-aged male in a position of power (at least from her perspective), was the axis of, shall we say, "virtue," while she, in her own mind at least, was the lone jihadi."
Not only is he racist when it comes to Nasreen, he also holds sexist views concerning her as a woman. This guy just does not understand women, it seems like. Whenever he mentions Nasreen, his prose is littered with impressions of how women are seemingly different just because they are women. It reads worse than a teenage boy trying to understand the concept of girls, women, and female sexuality. (Protip: Women are not a concept.) Lasdun is pretty much a living and breathing example of a Nice Guy™.
I will admit that I did find some parts of his memoir tolerable, and even enjoyable. His thoughts on being a writer strike a chord with me. His descriptions during his travels and his musings (when they're not sexist or racist) are very introspective. I think these are the only things that are keeping me going. At this point, I barely even care about the whole Nasreen episode. That seems more like a subplot compared to all the other things that he writes about. I would've even given one or two of his novels a go if I wasn't so disgusted by his hyperinflated sense of self or his intolerable viewpoints.
I'm not sure if this entire memoir was written to make Lasdum himself more popular than he actually is. He admits that he has a modest readership. I feel like all he wants out of this stalking episode is to make a quick buck and make his name more well known to the general public and entice potential readers. And if this is so, this probably wasn't the smartest way to go about it.
I'm glad I borrowed this book from the library. I'll keep my money, thanks. Or better yet, spend it on an author more deserving of critique, praise, or criticism. I've already wasted enough words on James Lasdun to last a lifetime.
Poor guy will probably read this review and think I'm Nasreen. But really though, who the fuck cares at this point? Grow the fuck up, dude.
June 26, 2016
I have mixed feelings about this book written by James Lasdun and consequently, it is difficult for me to assign it a rating. The title is what initially caught my attention but I discovered that the title is actually a bit misleading. The story related in these pages refers to specific form of stalking… cyberstalking. According to Norton Security Center, cyberstalking is "the use of technology, particularly the Internet, to harass someone. Common characteristics include false accusations, threats, identity theft, data destruction or manipulation." I had hoped that a portion of the book would be devoted to the stalker as I am always intensely interested in trying to understand and determine just what might motivate people to engage in particular behaviors. Mr. Lasdun's account did not really address these issues… and I suppose that is fair. After all, he would have no way of knowing what motivated his stalker and he certainly cannot speak for her.But I must confess to feeling a bit disappointed.
This book is well-written and the experiences Mr. Lasdun described were unpleasant and escalated to becoming truly frightening. James Lasdun's relationship with his cyberstalker began as simply a teacher/student relationship. James Lasdun, an English writer living in the United States, had been teaching a writing course at New York State Writer's Institute. During the course, he became acquainted with one of his students… a woman of Arab descent (and I mention it only because it ultimately appears to have some relevance later in his story), whom he refers to as Nasreen. Mr. Lasdun had been impressed with a book that Nasreen had begun writing . He felt she showed promise as a writer and offered to approach his own literary agent on her behalf. After the course ended, the two stayed in touch… exchanging occasional emails and even meeting in a cafe to discuss her writing. By the author's account, the emails, at first, seemed breezy, conversational and occasionally flirtatious.. which Mr. Lasdun admitted he enjoyed and was flattered by. He did not detect any undertone of malice; nor was there any aggressive language which made him feel uncomfortable.
Suddenly though, the light-hearted conversations online changed dramatically. Mr. Lasdun was baffled at the sudden change… had he made a remark that was misinterpreted by Nasreen? Had he misinterpreted her flirtation.. perhaps it had not been as light-hearted as it had seemed? And I completely understood James Lasdun's feelings about this…. I have often felt it is very difficult to ascertain a person's tone in reading emails.. unless I know the person very well and I can actually 'hear' his/her voice in the writing. Nasreen began bombarding Mr. Lasdun with hundreds of threatening and angry emails. She began leaving incomprehensible, obscenity laced rants on his voicemail. For a time, he attempted to ignore what was happening , but eventually he began to dread logging onto his email account. He ignored her, attempted to calm her, and he became angry with her… nothing he tried seemed to work for very long. Nasreen accused him of plagiarizing her work… using a story she wrote, calling it his own and publishing it. She accused him of being prejudiced against his Arab students, hurling anti-Semitic insults at him. She even accused him of having her drugged and then raped. Nasreen threatened his publisher and his colleagues. She posted vitriolic comments on Amazon, edited his Wikipedia page an posted hateful comments on Facebook.
This harassment campaign was shocking to read and I completely understood why Mr. Lasdun had wanted to ignore it all, hoping it would end on its own. He did end up reporting it to the police but it did not seem there was much they could do to help him. This surprised me and I wondered why the police could not stop this constant harassment. Of course, I do not have any knowledge as to what the laws are regarding this form of abuse online. Perhaps once again, technology has progressed so quickly that the law has not been able to keep up.
The subject matter aside, this book often felt surreal and disjointed to me. I don't want to be harsh toward Mr. Lasdun … perhaps the tone of his writing reflects how he actually felt. But a significant portion of this book dealt mainly with his writing… a travelogue project he was working on with his wife, a trip he took to Israel…. much of this felt like 'filler' to me. Perhaps he did not have enough material for a book length piece on the stalking itself. Maybe this could have been better if it had been reworked as a feature story in a magazine.
Regardless, this was a bizarre story and a cautionary tale. And as an addendum to my review… I looked at James Lasdun's website after finishing the book and it appears that Nasreen has kept her promise when she told him this would "never end". Although he does not hear from her as frequently, she does, to this day, continue her harassment. I suppose Mr. Lasdun's profession would not allow it, but I wonder if perhaps he has considered going 'off the grid' for a time.
I need to say one more thing about this book. I came away from it feeling somewhat dissatisfied because I still do not have a sense of this woman, Nasreen. What happened? Did something happen in her life which upset her so and she ended up transferring her rage onto James Lasdun? Or were her rants and threats simply those of a madwoman? Certainly, this story was written from James Lasdun's point of view ; but the story seems incomplete. That said, it IS a strange and disturbing tale!
This book is well-written and the experiences Mr. Lasdun described were unpleasant and escalated to becoming truly frightening. James Lasdun's relationship with his cyberstalker began as simply a teacher/student relationship. James Lasdun, an English writer living in the United States, had been teaching a writing course at New York State Writer's Institute. During the course, he became acquainted with one of his students… a woman of Arab descent (and I mention it only because it ultimately appears to have some relevance later in his story), whom he refers to as Nasreen. Mr. Lasdun had been impressed with a book that Nasreen had begun writing . He felt she showed promise as a writer and offered to approach his own literary agent on her behalf. After the course ended, the two stayed in touch… exchanging occasional emails and even meeting in a cafe to discuss her writing. By the author's account, the emails, at first, seemed breezy, conversational and occasionally flirtatious.. which Mr. Lasdun admitted he enjoyed and was flattered by. He did not detect any undertone of malice; nor was there any aggressive language which made him feel uncomfortable.
Suddenly though, the light-hearted conversations online changed dramatically. Mr. Lasdun was baffled at the sudden change… had he made a remark that was misinterpreted by Nasreen? Had he misinterpreted her flirtation.. perhaps it had not been as light-hearted as it had seemed? And I completely understood James Lasdun's feelings about this…. I have often felt it is very difficult to ascertain a person's tone in reading emails.. unless I know the person very well and I can actually 'hear' his/her voice in the writing. Nasreen began bombarding Mr. Lasdun with hundreds of threatening and angry emails. She began leaving incomprehensible, obscenity laced rants on his voicemail. For a time, he attempted to ignore what was happening , but eventually he began to dread logging onto his email account. He ignored her, attempted to calm her, and he became angry with her… nothing he tried seemed to work for very long. Nasreen accused him of plagiarizing her work… using a story she wrote, calling it his own and publishing it. She accused him of being prejudiced against his Arab students, hurling anti-Semitic insults at him. She even accused him of having her drugged and then raped. Nasreen threatened his publisher and his colleagues. She posted vitriolic comments on Amazon, edited his Wikipedia page an posted hateful comments on Facebook.
This harassment campaign was shocking to read and I completely understood why Mr. Lasdun had wanted to ignore it all, hoping it would end on its own. He did end up reporting it to the police but it did not seem there was much they could do to help him. This surprised me and I wondered why the police could not stop this constant harassment. Of course, I do not have any knowledge as to what the laws are regarding this form of abuse online. Perhaps once again, technology has progressed so quickly that the law has not been able to keep up.
The subject matter aside, this book often felt surreal and disjointed to me. I don't want to be harsh toward Mr. Lasdun … perhaps the tone of his writing reflects how he actually felt. But a significant portion of this book dealt mainly with his writing… a travelogue project he was working on with his wife, a trip he took to Israel…. much of this felt like 'filler' to me. Perhaps he did not have enough material for a book length piece on the stalking itself. Maybe this could have been better if it had been reworked as a feature story in a magazine.
Regardless, this was a bizarre story and a cautionary tale. And as an addendum to my review… I looked at James Lasdun's website after finishing the book and it appears that Nasreen has kept her promise when she told him this would "never end". Although he does not hear from her as frequently, she does, to this day, continue her harassment. I suppose Mr. Lasdun's profession would not allow it, but I wonder if perhaps he has considered going 'off the grid' for a time.
I need to say one more thing about this book. I came away from it feeling somewhat dissatisfied because I still do not have a sense of this woman, Nasreen. What happened? Did something happen in her life which upset her so and she ended up transferring her rage onto James Lasdun? Or were her rants and threats simply those of a madwoman? Certainly, this story was written from James Lasdun's point of view ; but the story seems incomplete. That said, it IS a strange and disturbing tale!
January 5, 2014
Purports to be a story of how the author was stalked and the effect on his life. Instead, it's a navel-gazing comp lit essay with a few tidbits of crazy emails scattered throughout. I skipped about 1/4 of it because it meanders off into COMPLETELY UNRELATED stories about his travels to Provence, or to Santa Fe, or to Jerusalem. No story arc. No real feeling that the author was ever actually in danger. BORING.
April 18, 2013
It only stands to reason that when a book is titled Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, that the content is, indeed, about being stalked.
James Lasdun, though, has a far more ambitious agenda. This book, in his own words, is a “larger story woven from memories, journeys, portraits, observations – all the stray psychic material that had been drawn into orbit around the drama that had monopolized my consciousness for more than three years now.”
It’s important, I believe, for the reader to keep this in mind when approaching this book. If someone is looking for a linear story about the victim of a stalker, Give Me Everything You Have likely won’t satisfy.
The problem, as I see it, is that the stalking story IS so very powerful that it dwarfs all the “stray psychic material” and engages the reader in a far more visceral way. Here are the facts: Mr. Lasdun, the fine writer of The Horned Man, a happily married family man, and a British-born Jew, is also a teacher in an MFA program. Among his students is a woman he calls Nasreen – a talented Iranian student who Mr. Lasdun begins to mentor.
James Lasdun seems more “sold” on her talent than her classmates and his agent, whom he eventually recommends. Gradually, though, Nasreen – likely a borderline personality – becomes obsessed with Mr. Lasdun, emailing him obsessively, posting heinous accusations of plagiarism and sexual abuse on Amazon, GoodReads and Wiki, sending him anti-Semitic rants and threats of injury, and contacting his employers, agent, publisher, and other influential people from his professional life, even demanding his apartment keys.
The effect on James Lasdun is profound. He writes, “There was the private self, still, but for anyone who interacted with the world there was this strange new emanation of yourself, your Internet presence, and it was by this, increasingly, that others knew you and judged you. And again: “Even the (emails) that just consisted of abuse left a bruised, unclean feeling, and there was never time to purge this, so than an accumulation of unprocessed disgust, pain, and bewilderment seemed to be piling up inside me.”
James Lasdun candidly admits that he decided to write the book as a way to spare himself the unpleasantness of continuing to defend himself and also to release the large psychic energies that continued to poison him. Writers, after all, write: it is their way of making sense of the world.
The book takes two rather lengthy detours and both are external journeys. Mr. Lasdun, at one point, takes a cross-country train ride, where he ruminates about how his own stalking is connected to Sir Gawain’s trial-by-fire. In the last 50 pages or so, James Lasdun – a distinctly non-religious Jew – visits Israel, and gets in touch with his his father Denys’ famed architectural masterpiece, the Hurva synagogue. Both trips were spurred by the craziness swirling around him and, while both are intellectually interesting, the gut level reader involvement ebbs nonetheless. Ultimately, James Lasdun focuses squarely on how to maintain honor and reputation during the Internet age – a topic worthy of an entire book.
James Lasdun, though, has a far more ambitious agenda. This book, in his own words, is a “larger story woven from memories, journeys, portraits, observations – all the stray psychic material that had been drawn into orbit around the drama that had monopolized my consciousness for more than three years now.”
It’s important, I believe, for the reader to keep this in mind when approaching this book. If someone is looking for a linear story about the victim of a stalker, Give Me Everything You Have likely won’t satisfy.
The problem, as I see it, is that the stalking story IS so very powerful that it dwarfs all the “stray psychic material” and engages the reader in a far more visceral way. Here are the facts: Mr. Lasdun, the fine writer of The Horned Man, a happily married family man, and a British-born Jew, is also a teacher in an MFA program. Among his students is a woman he calls Nasreen – a talented Iranian student who Mr. Lasdun begins to mentor.
James Lasdun seems more “sold” on her talent than her classmates and his agent, whom he eventually recommends. Gradually, though, Nasreen – likely a borderline personality – becomes obsessed with Mr. Lasdun, emailing him obsessively, posting heinous accusations of plagiarism and sexual abuse on Amazon, GoodReads and Wiki, sending him anti-Semitic rants and threats of injury, and contacting his employers, agent, publisher, and other influential people from his professional life, even demanding his apartment keys.
The effect on James Lasdun is profound. He writes, “There was the private self, still, but for anyone who interacted with the world there was this strange new emanation of yourself, your Internet presence, and it was by this, increasingly, that others knew you and judged you. And again: “Even the (emails) that just consisted of abuse left a bruised, unclean feeling, and there was never time to purge this, so than an accumulation of unprocessed disgust, pain, and bewilderment seemed to be piling up inside me.”
James Lasdun candidly admits that he decided to write the book as a way to spare himself the unpleasantness of continuing to defend himself and also to release the large psychic energies that continued to poison him. Writers, after all, write: it is their way of making sense of the world.
The book takes two rather lengthy detours and both are external journeys. Mr. Lasdun, at one point, takes a cross-country train ride, where he ruminates about how his own stalking is connected to Sir Gawain’s trial-by-fire. In the last 50 pages or so, James Lasdun – a distinctly non-religious Jew – visits Israel, and gets in touch with his his father Denys’ famed architectural masterpiece, the Hurva synagogue. Both trips were spurred by the craziness swirling around him and, while both are intellectually interesting, the gut level reader involvement ebbs nonetheless. Ultimately, James Lasdun focuses squarely on how to maintain honor and reputation during the Internet age – a topic worthy of an entire book.
March 2, 2013
Chilling, brave, captivating.
I heard about this book on Fresh Air, where it was reviewed by a college professor (like James Lasdun). She got my attention when she pointed out that James Lasdun has lived and documented every professor's -- every writer's -- worst nightmare.
I was riveted by most of the book, especially Lasdun's descriptions of "Nasreen's" descent into all-out obsession and no-holds-barred harassment of him, and then his colleagues and family. Having been stalked (to a lesser degree) by a borderline person, I recognized and predicted some of Nasreen's escalations, and broke out into a cold sweat reading Lasdun's slow, not-quite-paranoid realization of exactly how she'd next take her smear campaign.
Lasdun describes well his growing panic, fully capturing the horror of watching his professional reputation being pierced and tattered...without wailing and gnashing in self-pity. His restraint, in this regard, serves the book well. So well, in fact, that as I leaned into the end of the book, seeking a triumphant climax of retribution or end to Nasreen's harassment, it was strangely climactic to understand that her behavior has not stopped. Only by changing the game -- going public by airing the whole sordid tale -- has Lasdun pivoted the story. (Part of me wonders whether he hopes that Nasreen's real identity will emerge, leaving his new fans and readers to engage in long-distance vigilante justice.)
I'm deducting 2 stars from my review because of the ample padding that Lasdun stuffs into his narrative: he draws in tales and myths, and even the building of a temple in Jerusalem, which bloats the book (in my opinion) as he tries to wring every drop of allegory out of them. It's too much, and I found myself impatiently skipping these sections because truth, and the fact of Nasreen's desperate and horrific hatred, is stranger and a lot more interesting than fiction.
I heard about this book on Fresh Air, where it was reviewed by a college professor (like James Lasdun). She got my attention when she pointed out that James Lasdun has lived and documented every professor's -- every writer's -- worst nightmare.
I was riveted by most of the book, especially Lasdun's descriptions of "Nasreen's" descent into all-out obsession and no-holds-barred harassment of him, and then his colleagues and family. Having been stalked (to a lesser degree) by a borderline person, I recognized and predicted some of Nasreen's escalations, and broke out into a cold sweat reading Lasdun's slow, not-quite-paranoid realization of exactly how she'd next take her smear campaign.
Lasdun describes well his growing panic, fully capturing the horror of watching his professional reputation being pierced and tattered...without wailing and gnashing in self-pity. His restraint, in this regard, serves the book well. So well, in fact, that as I leaned into the end of the book, seeking a triumphant climax of retribution or end to Nasreen's harassment, it was strangely climactic to understand that her behavior has not stopped. Only by changing the game -- going public by airing the whole sordid tale -- has Lasdun pivoted the story. (Part of me wonders whether he hopes that Nasreen's real identity will emerge, leaving his new fans and readers to engage in long-distance vigilante justice.)
I'm deducting 2 stars from my review because of the ample padding that Lasdun stuffs into his narrative: he draws in tales and myths, and even the building of a temple in Jerusalem, which bloats the book (in my opinion) as he tries to wring every drop of allegory out of them. It's too much, and I found myself impatiently skipping these sections because truth, and the fact of Nasreen's desperate and horrific hatred, is stranger and a lot more interesting than fiction.
March 23, 2021
Well I liked this, and I'm glad to have read it. There's a vague question mark over Lasdun's apparent lack of culpability, and other reviewers have brought it up, but he does talk about having his own sense that he must somehow deserve the shadow of guilt which now follows him around. That it's still possible to question him I'd suggest is down to the fact that this is a true and therefore messy story, and more valuable for that. Besides, if it were the story of a woman pursued aggressively by a man, there'd be no question of suggesting that she must have done something to lead him on, and rightly so. I think we can probably allow Mr Lasdun the same basic courtesy.
That said, the book also makes for an interesting study in the internal world of an overeducated middle class writer. I don't think he does himself any favours in a casual reader's eyes when he compares himself to Gawain. This and other references and pieces of his personal story would come across as pretentious, even pompous if it wasn't quite clear that this is actually just how the guy's mind works. Given his background, he's going to interpret his world in terms which are meaningful to him, and ultimately that has to be okay. We can't dismiss it just because it happens to sound a bit wanky.
For myself I enjoyed all the literary allusions and though it does rather ramble as it follows Lasdun through a few years in his almost comically liberal middle class life, it's testimony to his skill as a writer that the book never lost my interest by doing so. In the end, James Lasdun is a talented and powerful voice, perhaps just a tiny bit lacking in self-awareness, but who thoroughly deserves to be heard.
That said, the book also makes for an interesting study in the internal world of an overeducated middle class writer. I don't think he does himself any favours in a casual reader's eyes when he compares himself to Gawain. This and other references and pieces of his personal story would come across as pretentious, even pompous if it wasn't quite clear that this is actually just how the guy's mind works. Given his background, he's going to interpret his world in terms which are meaningful to him, and ultimately that has to be okay. We can't dismiss it just because it happens to sound a bit wanky.
For myself I enjoyed all the literary allusions and though it does rather ramble as it follows Lasdun through a few years in his almost comically liberal middle class life, it's testimony to his skill as a writer that the book never lost my interest by doing so. In the end, James Lasdun is a talented and powerful voice, perhaps just a tiny bit lacking in self-awareness, but who thoroughly deserves to be heard.
March 16, 2013
This is a starkly honest and gripping memoir about James Lasdun's experience with an obsessive former student, Nasreen, who tries to "ruin" him with a virulent cyber-stalking campaign involving anti-Semitic rants and accusations of plagiarism. Lasdun's attempts to make sense of the obsession by drawing connections between it and his favorite pieces of literature is fascinating, as is his own self-scrutiny.
Lasdun questions his own culpability in the course of events ("Was I an objective, impartial observer, a purely neutral participant in those early months of our exchange? I was not. Nobody ever is."). Lasdun wonders what he might have done to instigate such an attack and soon realizes that he has become as obsessed with his stalker as she is with him. Everything in his life, including his seemingly banal battle with groundhogs in his vegetable garden, becomes connected to Nasreen's endless barrage of attacks.
Lasdun's writing is clear, precise, and beautiful, and the parallels he draws to his own family, his scholarship, and his life in general make for an intimate and harrowing tale. James Lasdun is a wonderful writer who has the uncanny ability to take apart the threads of an terrifying situation and examine them with great perceptiveness and honesty. A highly recommended memoir.
Lasdun questions his own culpability in the course of events ("Was I an objective, impartial observer, a purely neutral participant in those early months of our exchange? I was not. Nobody ever is."). Lasdun wonders what he might have done to instigate such an attack and soon realizes that he has become as obsessed with his stalker as she is with him. Everything in his life, including his seemingly banal battle with groundhogs in his vegetable garden, becomes connected to Nasreen's endless barrage of attacks.
Lasdun's writing is clear, precise, and beautiful, and the parallels he draws to his own family, his scholarship, and his life in general make for an intimate and harrowing tale. James Lasdun is a wonderful writer who has the uncanny ability to take apart the threads of an terrifying situation and examine them with great perceptiveness and honesty. A highly recommended memoir.
March 9, 2013
You know a book is written by an English professor when, midway through the book, it veers suddenly into a fifty-page-long analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
February 25, 2013
I just skimmed this book from about 2/3 through to the end. I got it because I thought it would be interesting to hear about how and why this man was pursued by an internet stalker. What is really interesting about the story though is trying to understand why this woman would do it. Unfortunately, we never get any insight into that though - because this is not the stalker's story, it is the stalkee's. And while at first you sympathize with his plight and admire the insight he makes into himself and how this attack makes him feel, it eventually turns very navel-gazing. Because, like I said, it is all about him. And since he is a learned man, who makes many literary references, after a while, it is just an intellectual exercise. And I lost interest.
February 19, 2013
Well I thought this would be fascinating but the only interesting and/or moving writer in this book is Nasreen (the stalker). A crowning moment for me was when James Lasdun decides, you know, in his own non-medical opinion, that she is NOT mentally ill because if she were ill then he wouldn't really feel justified in writing a book about her. Um. Nice try.
February 10, 2017
Robin Sachs, my favorite reader of all time narrates this book which is how I came upon James Landon's frightening and astonishing memoir of being stalked (for years!) by a former student. The writing is exquisite. Most of the time I felt like I was in a bad dream. The sideline excursions to the main tale were very interesting although a bit random.
January 26, 2021
I am surprised by the low ratings here since, from what I have seen, this is Lasdun's best-known book. It seems that a lot of readers thought that the author was too self-centered and failed to come clean or acknowledge that his own actions may have triggered the traumatic events described in the book. I do not agree, but I do admit to having some mixed feelings about it. Some sections go on a little too long and the stalker's crazed, frantic messaging does grow repetitive. Usually I am very interested in the autobiographical writings of authors I admire, but in this case I began missing the fiction of James Lasdun, with its clarity, conciseness, and strong imagery.
Still, I am giving it 4 stars because the story is an important one. Things like this have happened to far too many people. Just to recap quickly, the book is centered on the author's recollections of an extreme case of cyber-stalking and verbal abuse that he was the victim of. The perpetrator was a former student, a woman of around 30 with whom he had a brief and unromantic friendship. When she begins to show some interest in him, while she is also hoping that he will help get her work published, Lasdun cuts off communication with her. This may not have been a good idea, because that precipitated a long, extensive barrage of loony, abusive behavior from her, most of it consisting of hostile emails and internet posts. And some of her writing is interesting in its own way, with an out of control, acidic humor to it.
Lasdun describes his feelings and actions in some detail - his visits to the police, and his anxiety and discomfort about the whole affair. He also works in some other strands, and discusses other things that were going on in his life at the time, e.g. his reflections on D.H. Lawrence (a hero of his) and the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, memories of his father, a famous architect, a recollection of a cross-country train journey, and a description of a trip to Jerusalem and some thoughts on Judaism in general (Lasdun is Jewish, but is not observant). Some of this felt irrelevant to the main story as I was reading it, but in retrospect it provided some welcome relief from the crazy, dreadful main strand of the book. Throughout his writing is perceptive and thoughtful, and touches on a number of worthwhile subjects. I would like to see some more nonfiction from him.
Still, I am giving it 4 stars because the story is an important one. Things like this have happened to far too many people. Just to recap quickly, the book is centered on the author's recollections of an extreme case of cyber-stalking and verbal abuse that he was the victim of. The perpetrator was a former student, a woman of around 30 with whom he had a brief and unromantic friendship. When she begins to show some interest in him, while she is also hoping that he will help get her work published, Lasdun cuts off communication with her. This may not have been a good idea, because that precipitated a long, extensive barrage of loony, abusive behavior from her, most of it consisting of hostile emails and internet posts. And some of her writing is interesting in its own way, with an out of control, acidic humor to it.
Lasdun describes his feelings and actions in some detail - his visits to the police, and his anxiety and discomfort about the whole affair. He also works in some other strands, and discusses other things that were going on in his life at the time, e.g. his reflections on D.H. Lawrence (a hero of his) and the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, memories of his father, a famous architect, a recollection of a cross-country train journey, and a description of a trip to Jerusalem and some thoughts on Judaism in general (Lasdun is Jewish, but is not observant). Some of this felt irrelevant to the main story as I was reading it, but in retrospect it provided some welcome relief from the crazy, dreadful main strand of the book. Throughout his writing is perceptive and thoughtful, and touches on a number of worthwhile subjects. I would like to see some more nonfiction from him.
February 21, 2013
"On Being Stalked," the subtitle of James Lasdun's memoir Give Me Everything You Have, hints at a storyline that is thrilling and suspenseful; the tiny little envelope accompanying this subtitle, which also happens to be the only image on the entire cover, hints at the opposite. Stalking is a lurid crime based on obsession, drive, and more often than not delusion, something rare that requires planning to be done successfully. Mail, whether physical or digital--daily or instantaneous, based in bureaucracy and routine or based in time-insensitive whim--is omnipotent, unavoidable, and sloppy, dominated in all forms by pointless advertisements and junk messages. Stalking is pure emotion expressed dangerously on an individual basis. Mail, in the majority of instances and regardless of form, lacks any sense of emotion beyond the customariness of greetings and closings; it is something that can be done en masse--form letters, bank statements, bills, CC'ed and BCC'ed e-mails, reply-alls, newsletters, coupons, spam--and increasingly so by machines, no human input whatsoever, which only intensifies its mindlessness.
At the heart of Lasdun's book is where these two dichotomous islands are bridged together--namely, in the solitary obsession of a graduate student named Nasreen. An Iranian immigrant, Nasreen enters James' world as a shy but promising student in his college creative writing class; years later, after reuniting over Nasreen's developing novel, she becomes fixated on him, first in a playfully flirtatious way, then with increasing directness, until he must rebuff her advances. She seems embarrassed and regretful, but the e-mails soon become more aggressive and more frequent, culminating in multiple e-mails a day filled with accusations of sexual impropriety, racism, sexism, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Soon, Nasreen's web expands to include Lasdun's agent, publisher, colleagues, and former employers, to the point where his very life is dominated by the fear inspired by her e-mails, which are sent from hundreds of miles away. Nasreen never calls, and he never calls her--in fact, he doesn't reply to her e-mails after a certain point, which does little to stem their anger or slow their frequency. They live on those dichotomous islands--he in the land of slow-paced and emotionless texts, of college lectures and ancient tomes and print publications, she in a fast-paced land of obsession that can be dispatched at the press of a button. But they are, paradoxically, as close as two people could possibly be.
Eventually, Nasreen takes to posting anonymous comments, submitting critical reviews of his book, and impersonating others, including Lasdun himself, in the hopes of destroying him, both personally and professionally. And she does all of this digitally, using e-mail and online booksellers and discussion boards to attack from a distance that protects her both physically and legally. (You start to believe that, were Lasdun to confront her in person, she would crumble--the kind of person who uses the distance and anonymity of the internet more defensively than offensively.) Lasdun goes to the FBI, but they do nothing. He goes to his local police, but they can offer little. Even a specialist in stalking crimes to whom Lasdun is referred leads nowhere but a weak phone call and some heartless warnings. He's lost to a world that he cannot control--in fact, no one can control the online world, not even Nasreen herself--and throughout the book, we see our helpless victim slowly resigning himself to the understanding that, no, there's no way he can fight this onslaught.
At the same time, Lasdun tells us about himself at length--his research, his family vacations, his own novels, one of which bears striking coincidences to his own life at the time--a narrative choice that may have been included to make our writer more sympathetic but actually slows his book down and muddies the focus. Had Lasdun kept strictly to the story of he and Nasreen, even while preserving his occasional asides about technology and privacy in our modern age, his story would have been far more interesting, but the book itself would have come in at just under 150 pages--far from a marketable book. Add to this his incessant need to deconstruct and analyze--and to tell us his intentions as he's doing it--makes his story different than most firsthand accounts of stalking, but it also reduces his insight until many of his passages read like those of a cold lit-theory professor looking for something more where there's actually nothing much at all. Nasreen is unstable, clearly and simply, but Lasdun wants it to be more than just that--he wants to see the prisms of her disorder, the historical and personal foundations of her problems, and in trying to understand her he becomes obsessive himself. He is looking for solution by becoming the problem.
It's in this way that his book is one of contradiction. He's a man who wants his privacy and security back but has no problem opening up his private life to the readers of his book. He dismisses Nasreen for e-mails accusing him of stealing and selling her work as the work of others...in a book about her, one that couldn't have existed without her, her work, and her words. In an age of cyber-stalking, cyber-bullying, and unregulated trolling, we're told that acknowledging the troublemakers will only encourage them--it satisfies their need for validation and attention--which is precisely the reason why Lasdun ignores her e-mails. This is perhaps the greatest contradiction of all--a man who ignores his stalker, who follows the standard procedures for dealing with an obsessive contact, and then undermines all of it by writing her into a book. In an age of e-mails that come and go, destined to appear and disappear with the same regularity and impact, Lasdun has written his villain into a book that will last--a bridge on which Nasreen can cross back and forth forever.
This review originally published at
There Will Be Books Galore
At the heart of Lasdun's book is where these two dichotomous islands are bridged together--namely, in the solitary obsession of a graduate student named Nasreen. An Iranian immigrant, Nasreen enters James' world as a shy but promising student in his college creative writing class; years later, after reuniting over Nasreen's developing novel, she becomes fixated on him, first in a playfully flirtatious way, then with increasing directness, until he must rebuff her advances. She seems embarrassed and regretful, but the e-mails soon become more aggressive and more frequent, culminating in multiple e-mails a day filled with accusations of sexual impropriety, racism, sexism, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Soon, Nasreen's web expands to include Lasdun's agent, publisher, colleagues, and former employers, to the point where his very life is dominated by the fear inspired by her e-mails, which are sent from hundreds of miles away. Nasreen never calls, and he never calls her--in fact, he doesn't reply to her e-mails after a certain point, which does little to stem their anger or slow their frequency. They live on those dichotomous islands--he in the land of slow-paced and emotionless texts, of college lectures and ancient tomes and print publications, she in a fast-paced land of obsession that can be dispatched at the press of a button. But they are, paradoxically, as close as two people could possibly be.
Eventually, Nasreen takes to posting anonymous comments, submitting critical reviews of his book, and impersonating others, including Lasdun himself, in the hopes of destroying him, both personally and professionally. And she does all of this digitally, using e-mail and online booksellers and discussion boards to attack from a distance that protects her both physically and legally. (You start to believe that, were Lasdun to confront her in person, she would crumble--the kind of person who uses the distance and anonymity of the internet more defensively than offensively.) Lasdun goes to the FBI, but they do nothing. He goes to his local police, but they can offer little. Even a specialist in stalking crimes to whom Lasdun is referred leads nowhere but a weak phone call and some heartless warnings. He's lost to a world that he cannot control--in fact, no one can control the online world, not even Nasreen herself--and throughout the book, we see our helpless victim slowly resigning himself to the understanding that, no, there's no way he can fight this onslaught.
At the same time, Lasdun tells us about himself at length--his research, his family vacations, his own novels, one of which bears striking coincidences to his own life at the time--a narrative choice that may have been included to make our writer more sympathetic but actually slows his book down and muddies the focus. Had Lasdun kept strictly to the story of he and Nasreen, even while preserving his occasional asides about technology and privacy in our modern age, his story would have been far more interesting, but the book itself would have come in at just under 150 pages--far from a marketable book. Add to this his incessant need to deconstruct and analyze--and to tell us his intentions as he's doing it--makes his story different than most firsthand accounts of stalking, but it also reduces his insight until many of his passages read like those of a cold lit-theory professor looking for something more where there's actually nothing much at all. Nasreen is unstable, clearly and simply, but Lasdun wants it to be more than just that--he wants to see the prisms of her disorder, the historical and personal foundations of her problems, and in trying to understand her he becomes obsessive himself. He is looking for solution by becoming the problem.
It's in this way that his book is one of contradiction. He's a man who wants his privacy and security back but has no problem opening up his private life to the readers of his book. He dismisses Nasreen for e-mails accusing him of stealing and selling her work as the work of others...in a book about her, one that couldn't have existed without her, her work, and her words. In an age of cyber-stalking, cyber-bullying, and unregulated trolling, we're told that acknowledging the troublemakers will only encourage them--it satisfies their need for validation and attention--which is precisely the reason why Lasdun ignores her e-mails. This is perhaps the greatest contradiction of all--a man who ignores his stalker, who follows the standard procedures for dealing with an obsessive contact, and then undermines all of it by writing her into a book. In an age of e-mails that come and go, destined to appear and disappear with the same regularity and impact, Lasdun has written his villain into a book that will last--a bridge on which Nasreen can cross back and forth forever.
This review originally published at
There Will Be Books Galore
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April 18, 2013I need to let my final reaction to this book marinate for a bit, I think. I will say that I initially thought it was brilliant and was sharply disappointed by the end. Which feels like an utterly bizarre thing to say about someone's narrative of being unrelentingly verbally and psychologically terrorized for five years, and counting. Lots going on here, some of it compelling, a good deal of it less so, especially as the book progresses. Textually dense and rather inscrutable when his gaze is turned inward, and quite a bit of murkiness in their initial relationship. Which is not to blame the victim or in any way justify the vitriol.
Also, the way it all fades to black—becomes a footnote and almost disappears—toward the book’s conclusion is unsatisfactory (another bizarre thing to say about a true-life and ongoing ordeal, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast in trying to assess this sort of thing). As another reviewer remarked, I want to know more about how he learned to cope, shrug it off, move on (or form some kind of uneasy reconciliation with/resignation to the impossibility of moving on). How this all-consuming nightmare—in which the stalkee is as obsessive as the stalker—ended up relegated to the footnote realm (or so it seems by the end).
One reviewer commented on the reaffirmed sense of being grateful for relative mental health and how this is often taken for granted by those of us who retain some sort of tenuous grasp on it. This rings true for my experience with this book. As someone who also went to the dark side in her identification with the P.J. Harvey persona, perhaps one of my strongest impressions here is that I'm glad things didn't get too cray-cray and I ultimately gleaned the distinction between the romance of a tormented artistic persona versus actually living said persona (which is, like this account unfortunately ends up becoming, a drag).
More to think and say about this, but, as I said, some marinating is in order.
Also, the way it all fades to black—becomes a footnote and almost disappears—toward the book’s conclusion is unsatisfactory (another bizarre thing to say about a true-life and ongoing ordeal, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast in trying to assess this sort of thing). As another reviewer remarked, I want to know more about how he learned to cope, shrug it off, move on (or form some kind of uneasy reconciliation with/resignation to the impossibility of moving on). How this all-consuming nightmare—in which the stalkee is as obsessive as the stalker—ended up relegated to the footnote realm (or so it seems by the end).
One reviewer commented on the reaffirmed sense of being grateful for relative mental health and how this is often taken for granted by those of us who retain some sort of tenuous grasp on it. This rings true for my experience with this book. As someone who also went to the dark side in her identification with the P.J. Harvey persona, perhaps one of my strongest impressions here is that I'm glad things didn't get too cray-cray and I ultimately gleaned the distinction between the romance of a tormented artistic persona versus actually living said persona (which is, like this account unfortunately ends up becoming, a drag).
More to think and say about this, but, as I said, some marinating is in order.
March 25, 2013
To have someone stalk you must be incredibly scary and frustrating. I was really riveted by the story of how a seemingly innocent acquaintance wormed her way into the author's life and terrorized him (and continues to do so). Unfortunately I don't think Lasdun does himself any favors in the way the story unfolds. While the literary musings didn't bother me, some sort of more straightforward timeline of events and better explained direct attempts to shake "Nasreen" from his life would have made for a better read. But overall, unforgettable - and should be a wake-up call to legislators who need to expand the definition of stalking, and to anyone who may be a victim.
February 14, 2013
Everybody stalks everybody but sometimes you get one that's way too committed to the game.
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