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Dyer started out with the intention of writing either a sober academic study of Lawrence or a novel based on his subject's life but couldn't seem to do either. The academic study, he realized, was really just an excuse to read Lawrence's work, and the novel never even acquired a rudimentary shape in his mind. Instead, he somehow convinced his publisher to pick up the tab for his lengthy globetrotting pilgrimage, which took him from Paris to Rome to Greece to Oxford--not to mention such Lawrentian hotspots as Taos and Mexico and San Francisco. The result is an extended, often hilarious, meditation on seafood, English TV, Dyer's own creative impulses, and occasionally even Lawrence.
In Lawrence's seminal prose he finds some justification for his own capricious indulgences: "What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free.... There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious." Yet he refuses to read Lawrence's novels, confining himself to letters, travel reportage, and other casuals. Indeed, "[o]ne gets so weary watching authors' sensations and thoughts get novelised, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression."
Dyer's fascination with Lawrence's minorabilia suggests not only an oblique criticism of the contemporary novel, but a promising direction for the memoir. Perhaps clean, well-lighted subjectivity is a dead end, and the future lies with eccentric, provisional works along the lines of Flaubert's Parrot and How Proust Can Change Your Life--or Out of Sheer Rage. After all, Dyer's bright (and brilliantly shambolic) book of life reminds us of why we read in the first place: to see the surprising ways one person can be brought to life by another. --Michael Joseph Gross
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Sitting down to write a book about his hero D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write. In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer's footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach . . . And yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a 'sober academic study' reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today. Out of Sheer Rage is a complete one-off, a richly comic study of the combination of bad temper, procrastination and the uncanny power of obliquity. 'The funniest book I have ever read' - Steve Martin Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781782115137
Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9781782115137
Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9781782115137
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Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. Seller Inventory # B9781782115137
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 272 pages. 7.80x5.08x0.67 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __1782115137
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Book Description Condition: New. Presents the study of the combination of bad temper, procrastination and the uncanny power of obliquity. Num Pages: 272 pages. BIC Classification: DN. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 128 x 20. Weight in Grams: 192. . 2015. Main - Dyer series cover. Paperback. . . . . Seller Inventory # V9781782115137
Book Description Condition: New. Presents the study of the combination of bad temper, procrastination and the uncanny power of obliquity. Num Pages: 272 pages. BIC Classification: DN. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 128 x 20. Weight in Grams: 192. . 2015. Main - Dyer series cover. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9781782115137
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 6666-TBS-9781782115137