Il ragazzo scrive bene e lo sa. Oh, se lo sa! Se ne compiace, si ammira allo specchio, vanesio e irritante. Però poi tira fuori dei brani così e allora va bene, maledetto, continuo a leggere. Anche se arrivo alla fine che sono stremata e un po' ti odio, Eggers. Ma sebbene stremata voglio rileggere la prefazione. E i suggerimenti iniziali. E i credits che di solito scrive l'editore e qui no, li ha scritti lui.
Sfiancante e brillante.

"Vorrei salvare e conservare tutto, ma allo stesso tempo vorrei anche che tutto sparisse, incapace come sono di decidere se è più romantica la conservazione o il decadimento."

"Non potete impedirci di guardare con commiserazione i tristi abitanti di questo mondo, tutti quelli che non hanno avuto in sorte il nostro fascino, che non sono stati messi alla prova dalle nostre tribolazioni, che sono privi delle nostre cicatrici e pertanto deboli, gelatinosi.“

"Qualunque somiglianza con persone morte o viventi dovrebbe essere piuttosto evidente a coloro che dette persone hanno conosciuto, specie laddove l'autore è stato così gentile da fornire i loro veri nomi e, in alcuni casi, i loro numeri di telefono. Tutti gli avvenimenti descritti nel libro sono realmente avvenuti, anche se di tanto in tanto l'autore si è preso alcune piccole libertà relativamente alla cronologia, essendo questo un suo diritto in quanto americano."

i never finished this book, and i don't particularly plan to.

i mean sure, it's funny, it's sad, it has its moments. i got involved with the graphic and emotionally staggering descriptions of his parents. and this guy has had a pretty intense life if this is his memoir. recognition must be given for that. fine. but the preface? the rules? dear lord. the last thing i need to read is the self-indulgent self-obsessed tale of a self-centric and self-aggrandizing smart kid. i have enough of those around me in real life, and i tend to tune out when they start talking.

i stopped reading at part two when he starts up might magazine. does it get better after that? let's hope, for the sake of the pulitzer committee that decided to make it a finalist. i rarely just give up on books like this, so a part of me wants to pick up again just to know what happens. and to know why it was so wildly popular.

but then again, i don't particularly like mcsweeney's. maybe that's my problem. i don't know. read it if you want. meh.

I really wanted to love this book! Don’t get me wrong, he did have me laughing out loud many times, but around page 200 and the Real World interview, I just couldn’t anymore. About half of this book could have been edited out. He’s very long-winded and slightly politically incorrect. Very funny at times, but no, couldn’t get through it.

I bet I'm better at sock skating than Eggers is.

Dave Eggers è uno scrittore che mi piace molto, e questo è certamente un buon esordio. Tuttavia trovo che sia un po' datato o forse sono io ad averlo letto fuori tempo massimo. Però mantiene vivo il dolore, l'ansia, la paranoia di una situazione difficile da gestire, una solitudine che si sfoga nella scrittura incalzante e nel cercare senso nelle cose che un senso non ce l'hanno. Lo preferisco però nei suoi libri successivi.

A very fine book, but tied closely with its period, so a bit dated. I suppose the publisher will be footnoting it before too long. I’m going to have to read that really long, really serious Péter Nádas’ novel afterward, for AHWOSG is far too hysterical. Excessive hysteria pushed past all reasonable thresholds of human tolerance into the realm of whistling past the graveyard. I think it’s the twentysomething prospect of near-continuous coitus that’s to blame, making the text at times almost a giddy stream of consciousness. Yes, sex, and the subsequent sadness that visits all animals (see Galen), is effervescently behind the unrelenting half-grimacing hysteria here, the flopsweaty feigned cool. Everyone is a walking talking cut of meat, under constant appraisal, marked up or down accordingly. Every waking moment, my God, the pressure to be hot... (But this is subtext, mostly.)

Then our narrator and his friend are fucking on a public beach at night. Some Hispanic kids come up. The lovers are virtually naked. The passersby are needlessly cruel as only youngsters can be. It’s as if they can’t turn away from this spectacle of sex. It holds them in thrall. They know they should move away but they don’t. Then our narrator makes things worse by threatening to call the cops. He can’t find his wallet, which belonged his late father. (N.B. The kids don’t have it.) He doesn’t hesitate to tell them of the disadvantage they will be at when the police arrive. It’s ugly, but riveting. (Akin to what happened recently in Central Park, New York, when a hysterical white woman turned on a proud African-American bird watcher.)

Then the narrator blames his friend, John, who tries to commit what is admittedly a ridiculous attempt at suicide. His empathy fails. Eggers seems on a pace here to outdo Will Self’s not infrequently humiliating cruelty. Like Self, Eggers will go to almost any length to outrage the reader in the name of entertainment. And Eggers knows this, so then he pulls the cruelty in for a post-modernist query every now and then, in which his shame is poked and prodded as a means of self absolution. He upbraids himself, too. He really doesn’t let himself off the hook easily. Everything, you might say, no matter the cost, is bought and paid for.

The narrator’s guilty and brilliant digressions, when he’s taken a little time out for himself, must be ⅓ of the book. When for instance he leaves Tōpf with a new sitter and goes out seeking sex. His imaginings of what might happen to Tōph in his absence are grotesque and wild. It’s touching because he’s 22, beginning his sexually active life, and divided between that travail and what remains of his family.

The nonsense associated with his fly-by-night magazine, Might, is hilarious; especially the Adam Rich faux obit whose ramifications neither the undead nor the editors were prepared to handle. Then there’s Tōph who, with the narrator’s canny last-second maneuvering, gets a handshake from Bill Clinton outside Chez Panisse. The narrator passing a kidney stone. Have you ever seen one of those things? They look like jacks or perhaps a barb cut from barbed wire. Poor man. But the frisbee playing–there I drew the line; 35 pages on frisbee tricks; I think not.

Anyway, the prose flies faultlessly along. Even the parts that are too long, like the MTV interview, which is a wonderful critique of the show’s clichés, but at 54 pages egregiously long. This is Generation X’s On the Road, but with name brands and well known movies and historical events peppered throughout. Reading it 17 years after publication it feels like a kind of period novel, not unlike Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, but without the big picture view of geopolitical and celebrity shenanigans. That’s high praise.

What strikes me most is Eggers’s recognition of his subject matter. That was very shrewd indeed. To know he had this story before him. The parental deaths are horrible, no question, and the pressure on the author to be a kind of pre-parent at age 22 to his brother Tōph is unfair. Fortunately, he and his brother were blessed by an enormously rich social network. That’s a gift. In that sense I envy them. That, if anything, was their saving grace.

This did not do much for me. It was readable but I am very unsure of why it was so loved. I suppose young parenting is not something I want to know more about.

Well, I hated this book, and not because it wasn't brilliant. I lolled around in the drunkenly ironic and wandering introduction until I cackled, thank you very much. But when this book turned into the naval-gazing account of a bitter young man abusing his orphan little brother, I checked out. I personally can't get on board with the literary elite's falling all over themselves for literature that exploits those whom life has already exploited.

Having said all that, you'll enjoy this book if you enjoy irony and other brilliant renderings of rhetorical devices. I mean, there's a reason Heartbreaking Work was nominated for a Pulitzer. But you might hate it if you dislike jackasses abusing children. (I guess there's a reason why it was passed up too, right?)

Take care out there, fellow readers and booklovers. Remember your masks and your hands! Stay bookish, stay resilient!

The opening chapter of this (sort-of) memoir blew me away: Eggers' mother is dying of cancer, and the way he describes it is messy and sad and, yes, funny. Both of his parents die within weeks of each other and it's so tragic it's almost unfathomable. I was into it, and then the rest of the book happened...and I just didn't really care about anything that was happening anymore: Eggers, the legal guardian of his young brother, living life as a listless twenty-something in San Francisco in the 90s.

Full disclosure: I was worried going into this that my love for David Foster Wallace would taint my enjoyment of it. That Eggers would inevitably come across to me as the lesser of the two PoMo Daves. Maybe I would have appreciated it more otherwise, but so much of it felt derivative, and I kept thinking to myself that I wish I was reading DFW.

I actually really enjoyed Eggers' postmodern gimmicks: the notes and acknowledgements at the beginning of the book, people breaking character in the middle of a conversation to provide meta literary analysis (via Eggers) of what's currently happening. That sense of clever self-awareness is prevalent throughout, and it's smart and it's interesting: it provides a worthy commentary of memoirs as a literary art form, and is a bold achievement of brutally honest self-analysis. These were my favorite parts of the book aside from the first chapter.

The thing that's lacking, though (and the thing that DFW really nailed) is sincerity. Eggers may be authentic, sure, but he maintains a comfortable distance from emotion and sincerity. In fact, he's actually pretty insufferable and obnoxious. His own sense of self-importance and self-obsession is on full display. And look, I understand and appreciate that his solipsism is a method of coping with the close proximity he feels to death. I get that he thinks that if he shares his suffering, he may succeed in diluting it and proving to himself that he suffered for a reason. After all, this whole thing is, of course, his attempt at coping with the tragedy of his parents' death.

The thing is...I don't really believe any of it. I don't believe him. And so AHWOSG never really transcended for me. It sort of just felt like an exercise in postmodernism for the sake of it, and it's hard as a reader not to feel cheated by that.

And honestly, maybe this is what he was going for: maybe we should feel cheated by memoirs.

There's a sense of mania throughout, and a strong undercurrent of anger. I appreciate that anger, I even appreciate the stoicism and flippancy. I get it. I just craved some sincerity. Ultimately there wasn't enough here to justify all the time spend enduring his ego.

I am 17 years late reading this book; one of those books that had been lauded and been quite popular for some time, even being hailed as a contemporary classic of non fiction.

I found myself at a weird juxtaposition of feelings here. First, it is a indeed a well-written piece of literature, with wild cadences and sentences that show off a real explosive talent for language. But that is it. Other than how well its crafted, its story itself is the real problem.

Dave Eggers, his siblings Bill, Beth, and Toph are all orphaned by the death of their parents in rapid succession. However, Toph is the only one who is a kid- and Dave must take care of him.

Wrestling with trying to launch a magazine, getting laid/not getting laid and constantly feeling sorry for himself- I did not identify at all with Dave's struggles of trying to have a life as a privileged straight 22 year old; or that raising his kid brother was truly terrible because he wanted to go out and be a selfish and pompous ass he ends up depicting in the book.

In other words- it screams while male privilege, and continues to keep screaming in self-indulgent ecstasy in 400+ annoying pages. The more think about it, I despised this book.

I have read Eggers' Zeitoun, and found that to be a heartbreaking work of real non-fiction (although that wound up a tragic scandal in itself). I would recommend not this book to my friends looking for a good read.

I've been writing a paper on student accountability for the past three days. All I've been able to think about is writing the review for this book. I'm at my stalling breaking point. Also, it's 12:11 AM, so my brain's about fried.

Which is to say, if you're still reading this review, you may want to stop now. It could get a little crazy. How crazy? I'm sure we're probably talking Fear Dot Com crazy. What a web-review you've stumbled across. (And I don't mean "fear dot com" crazy like this review is going to be a ripoff of some other review the way that fear dot come was a ripoff of The Ring either...) See, already you're getting a little freaked out because you watched those two movie trailers.

Geez. I wanted this review to be big, and important, and garner all sorts of likes from all sorts of people that I don't even know. I wanted it to say something. ANYTHING really, but most importantly something.

I wanted to give myself back to Dave Eggers in this review. To display my insides. The hurt, the joy, the sheer overwhelmingness of all that fits into a single (if there is such a thing) life. I wanted this review to be a vivisection of me for the whole world to be able to look at my heart in my chest, still pumping blood while I smile up at Dave and say, "Hey, look man. It's no problem. It's the least I can do for you after you gave so much of yourself to us."

I guess he's probably not asking for that. (Which is good, because I'm worried this review is turning to shit.) But then again, we didn't ask for all he gave. Perhaps it's too much. Perhaps he gave too much. Did I need to know about his masturbatory habits? No. Did I find that a little bit weird? Yes. But man, THAT was the book. A no-holds-barred, laying it all out, I may be pretentious, but maybe you'll learn something from my pretention, but maybe it's all some sort of f***ery.

I wanted this review to go on for pages. For people to read it and think, "MY G-D, he's rambling." But then look back at it again and say, "But no. Didn't you see where he hit Toph's head on the doorframe? That's just like where he hit his mom's head." Or "Every time he goes on some diatribe he gets so focused on opining on the topic that he misses his exit... oh wait... maybe that was intentional... maybe he didn't miss the exit in real life. Maybe he only missed it in the narrative to make a point."

But what would that point be in this review? That I liked the book? That I'm both jealous of Dave Eggers' freedom, and annoyed by how cavalierly he flaunts it? That I, too, am inwardly self-obsessed, but I pretend to be outwardly self-obsessed because it lets me sleep at night and gives my life meaning? Listen, all you symbolic Tophs out there. LISTEN! The point is this. Shit. I missed my exit.

What was I saying?

I know. Thanks, Dave. Maybe I've learned something about myself. What I can, and can't give. What I've lost, and what I will lose. That writing a self-conscious memoir is ok, especially if you are self-aware and use self-degradation throughout.

I guess, if you have AIDS, I have AIDS now too. As you bared your soul, bled all over me, and I soaked it all in.

Thanks. You're an asshole. But an asshole I love.

I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Eggers has created something raw, graphic, gritty, something real and it is an emotional sometimes painful read. It is the way in which he deals with grief that appeals to me most. His crazy stream of consciousness writing style is so refreshingly real. At times it seems you are reading his thoughts, unedited. Instead of wallowing in grief for the entire novel he refuses to confront his emotions and whirls around like a frisbee comically avoiding the world.

What got to me about this book was that while I read about his life after his parents' death, while I laughed at his jokes and listened to his rants, while I tried to make sense of his rambles and his pointless thoughts mentioned it seemed only to avoid thinking of anything important...I could still sense the emotions he was trying to hide.

I myself will grow cynical while saddened. Humor can be a great way to cope with grief. When I lost my grandfather and then was unable to attend his funeral, I cried at first...then I laughed until I was crying again. It all seemed so absurd. That I could get on the plane and yet one small weather issue prevented me from saying goodbye to someone so dear to me...Over the next few days I tried to not think about his death, tried to fill my mind with thoughts about anything else, tried to engage myself in other activities, I laughed, I joked with friends...I didn't want to cope with the grief. I ranted about how much life sucked, or what I saw was wrong with this fucked up world. And then once everyone left me to myself I cried. I broke down and screamed and cursed God and everything around me and cried. Only when I finally dealt with his death and accepted it, did I find some sort of peace. This book for me expressed the same raw emotions.

It is his awareness of how this is destroying him, his acknowledgment of how angry he is with the world around him for giving him a difficult life that makes this book so appealing. He attempts to poke fun at himself to soften the story, to make it less tragic, maybe to make it seem that he has been able to move on...yet at heart this is simply the heartbreaking story of a young man who has lost his parents and is left to raise his brother alone. At the end after all of the glitz, glitter and shall I say clutter he fills the novel with he finally gets down to what he wanted to express all along...

The last several pages of raw emotion tear at you. You see his soul, raw and bleeding. No this isn't a pity me, poor me situation, I believe this is a cry of desperation, a moment of insanity. He has entertained the reader, made a joke even about his situation, presented himself as arrogant and self centered...but I truly believe it was all an act...to protect himself. Because that is what we do as humans, we hide our emotions any way we know how, and we protect ourselves to the best of our ability. It is better to laugh things off than to cry and indicate our weakness and fear of death.

My heart broke for him and upon reading the words finally finally finally after his rant about what he was trying to show us, what he was trying to entertain us with and how he had given everything, I knew it was true.

This book is incredible. Skim over the middle if needed. He clutters it, I think intentionally however. You will laugh, cry and then think why is he rambling about people running nude on a beach...but it is a wonderful novel and well worth the read.

***excuse the length but I cannot express enough how much this book meant to me and touched my life.