Out of Sheer Rage : Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence - Hardcover

Dyer, Geoff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865475334 ISBN 13: 9780865475335

Publisher: North Point Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Recounts the author's experiences visiting the places D.H. Lawrence lived while actively not working on a book about Lawrence and not writing his own novel

About this title

About the Author

Geoff Dyer is the author of Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, as well as Paris Trance: A Romance, and But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. He lives in England.

Reviews

...a potently distilled treatise on literature, blessedly free of the academic cant that Dyer so disdains.

Dyer writes two books at once, his own life and a challenging life of D.H. Lawrence, in this unique performance. This wrestling match with Lawrence reveals the author and his subject as finely matched opponents who ultimately shake hands on the nature of life and art. Dyer's record of his time spent exhaustively studying Lawrence is both tormented and comic. He ``rages'' at his very goals and against the compulsion to write, while also tracing, intermittently, Lawrence's own life's itinerary. In a sense, the project is a doomed undertaking. For could there be any less auspicious literary pursuit than formalizing the process of going ``from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of the to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either . . .''? Chagrined by his ambivalence, seduced by his indecisiveness, Dyer aspires to the ``floaty indifference of contentment'' and comes to prefer Lawrence's manuscripts to the final texts. He longs for freedom, yet his gateway into Lawrence comes in a moment of raging indolence. Convinced that Lawrence's ``writing urges us back to the source,'' Dyer traces the other writer's footsteps. Taos and Oaxaca, Sardinia and Eastwood are important backdrops along the way. Such scenery lures Dyer into a dialogue with Lawrence's mentors and tormentors and into the heat and chill of the arguments they waged. Larkin, Brodsky, and Julian Barnes are poetic referees in the ring. The push-me-pull-me here of the text and the sub-text, of biography and autobiography, turns up the volume on this fascinating symbiosis, which casts a new light on creativity and the importance of destiny. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

There are well over 1000 books on D.H. Lawrence, but this one has an unconventional angle. On the first page, one is disabused of the notion that this will be yet another critical analysis or biography, perhaps brilliant, perhaps jargon-ridden, but destined to join all the others. Instead of his planned academic "Lawrence Book," Dyer (But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, LJ 11/15/95) gives us a splendid study on procrastination, denial, rationalization, and writer's block. As he travels around Paris, Greece, Oaxaca, and other locales, he agonizes over such things as what books to bring along and which to leave behind; either way, they become excuses for not writing. There is the irony that the self-admittedly undisciplined Dyer did indeed manage to produce this book, even if not the learned tome he had intended. It deserves to be called his "Lawrence Book," and it's probably all the better for the manner in which it was written. Heartily recommended, although libraries need not purchase if they have the 1997 British edition.?Janice E. Braun, Mills Coll., Oakland, CA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865475334
• ISBN 13: 9780865475335
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 242