i love dave eggers. this is the main character describing how his mind works (he sits at a desk at the top of a grassy hill overlooking a meadow and stream, and the library is inside the hill and is staffed by little pale, oily, hairless people that look like moles):

"And as much as I value the efficiency and professional elan of the library staff, I'd begun recently to worry about a new wrinkle in their procedures. For the most part, they're supposed to act on my requests when I make requests, and to otherwise just keep an orderly file system. Part of the deal, implicitly, is that at no time should the staff members *choose for me* what information I should be given. But lately I'd be sitting at my desk, trying either to work or to just admire the view and wonder about the stream, what makes it go, if there are fish inside, what their names might be, if any of them are secretly talking fish and if so what they might say--when there will suddenly be a library staff member at my side, and she will have one hand on my back, and the other will be pointing to the contents of a file she's brought me and has opened on my desk, so that I will follow her finger to where she's pointing, and when I see what she's pointing to I will gasp."

Took this off the shelf at our current housesit in NZ because I’ve read two other Dave Eggers books and figured there was a good chance I’d enjoy it. In fact, probably the perfect time to read it - a story about friends in their 20s traveling (in a much more chaotic way than us, true) and not knowing what they’re doing or what they want.

I think the thread of grief and how it manifests really brings it all together though - as far as I can tell this isn’t true in every edition of this book but in mine the book starts literally on the cover of the book and continues on the inside cover - no title pages, copyright, or anything. Seeing the ‘end’ of the story in the first line right on the cover and slowly learning the timeline and details worked really well for me. Mourning and processing the death of your friend and the loss of possibility in your life bc of it without knowing you’re months from death too. Wanting answers or direct purpose and knowing you really won’t be getting any.

Very amused by the pictures & scanned documents scattered throughout - I’m curious about the origins of the photos especially. Scene description written around them or photos taken for pre existing writing?

“I wanted something to happen so my choices would be fewer, so my map would have a route straight through, in red. I wanted limitations, boundaries, to ease the burden, because the agony, Jack, when we were up there in the dark, was in the silence! All I ever wanted was to know what to do.” ———> getting at some of the same stuff that I really love in Fleabag - knowing you have the options and opportunities that others (your dead friend) don’t anymore but feeling unable to grasp that and do anything you think matters with it - wishing it was clearer, that there was a reason and a purpose, feeling like you’re wasting something someone else would have done a better job with.

Hey main character, are you upset about something? Is nothing working out for you? AWWWWWW poor baby! Did you experience a personal loss that you found painful? Oh no! You must be the first person ever to feel pain! I feeeeeel sooooooo baaaaaaaaad for you! Are you going to tell us what happened? Oh, you'd rather give it to us bit by bit to keep up the suspense? Ok, that works (pbbbbttttt). Do you find things in normal everyday life hard to take, Holden Caulfield? Do you want to share with us experiences of things you find to be incredible and sad? I know an AA group that would love to have you!

I really dispised this book. And by despised, I mean that I was utterly dissapointed because the premise seemed to have so much potential and I had heard a lot of good things about Eggers. But instead I found the book to be cliched and totally inundated with bad sentimentality.

The cover of this book was really cool.

tLegitimately, probably the worst novel I've ever read. Neither interesting nor intellectually intriguing, it seems Eggers debut novel was meant to satisfy nothing more than his public posture.
tTake a deep breath all you uninteresting white males: your story is not unique, your suffering is not beautiful. You are a selfish asshole, just like everyone else, yet without fail an infinite number of these "cerebral" authors sublimate their own perceived struggles into meaningless, emotionless, and reprehensible characters, all of which are drawn with the heaviest of hands.
tThe actual plot to this novel was so profoundly stupid that I found myself laughing out loud. As if we are not privileged enough as Americans, we need to take our almighty dollar to far away lands and pour cash into the laps of those wretched souls, or bury it in their soil, or strap it to their livestock, all to give some "meaning" to our lives.
tThere must be a massive wheel that all author's consult (not unlike an oracle) when they attempt to write their next novel. At the wheel, the author spins for character, occupation, plot, and obscure friend with strange name. For instance: Will is a lightbulb silhouette who is paid for his work still feels guilty, and decides to fly to poor places and tape money to animals with his friend Hand.
tHow infuriating is it that in this multi-national piece, every poorly constructed character these two jackoffs encounter is somehow an adept English speaker? Or that all they want to discuss is the Chicago Bulls or American pop music? This novel is so incredibly selfish that it would have read no differently if the locations were set entirely on American soil.
tGenerally when I encounter something as poorly constructed as this novel, I let it speak for itself:
t
t"Hand, it's what we did to that cow."
t"Will. It's not the cow."
t"Hand, we burned that cow alive."
t"The cow was dying."
--
t-I know.
t-C'mon
t-Really.
t-Sure.
t-Good. Okay. Shit.
t-Okay--
t-Man this is like helium.

This novel is built on truly profound dialogue. Though I will admit, I got a great chuckle out of the father falling from the balcony and crushing the mother. Characters enter and exit the novel constantly, but one of the most poorly named character of all-time was the middle-school girl named Terri Glenn. Perhaps she outgrew this novel and started at wide receiver for the New England Patriots, I guess we'll never know. I'll close this review with a few of Eggers own words:
t"Every story, Hand, is sadder than ours."

***
tDespite reading two horrific fictive pieces, I may give Eggers another shot with regards to his non-fiction. Although, after digging briefly, I've found he was behind several lackluster screenplays: Away We Go and Where the Wild Things Are. So that's awful.

n  

I don't know what that was, all that dancing -- what we're allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do. What are we allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do?

n
You Shall Know Our Velocity has a strange history: Meant as a fictional memoir, it was released in 2002, with an apparently strangely textured hardcover and the opening paragraph, announcing the author's untimely death, printed on the front. In May of 2003, the book was renamed Sacrament and an extra chapter -- supposedly written by the dead author's friend at a later time to rebut details of the original book -- was inserted two thirds of the way through. In September of 2003, the book was again retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! (note the exclamation mark) for the paperback edition (the one I read), complete with the extra chapter and a note on the cover that states, "This paperback edition includes significant changes and additions". Anyone who has read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius knows that Dave Eggers has a quirky sense of style, so it begs the question: Is You Shall Know Our Velocity! an innovative comment on the nature of memoir or a self-indulgent art piece?

As I often do, I read some old newspaper reviews of this book after finishing it and it was interesting to me that critics were mostly underwhelmed by the original version, but since I haven't found a review of the "complete" version, their critique seems nearly irrelevant. One thing I did find interesting: Writing in Salon, Peter Kurth notes of the two main characters, "Will (Thought) has a friend called Hand (Action)". I hadn't noticed that, but again, is that truly clever or fatally ironic?

In Hand's rebuttal chapter, in which he lists all of the parts that Will had made up, he writes:

n  

I realize how difficult the world makes it for those who want to lead and talk about unusual lives in a candid way, in a first-person way. I understand that to sublimate a life in fictions, to spread the ashes of one's life over a number of stories and books, is considerably better-accepted, and protects one greatly from certain perils -- notably, the rousing of anger or scorn of all the bitches of the world (more often male than female). But then again, I don't know -- maybe he wasn't afraid of that sort of thing. Maybe he just wanted to fictionalize for his own entertainment. Maybe he found it artful.

n
As this was Eggers' first novel, coming on the heels of his debut tragic memoir, I have to believe that this is a comment on the author's own experience -- so did he write this book as an example of how he could have sublimated and fictionalised his own losses if he had wanted to, or did he mean it to be "artful"? Is this an example of meta-ironic hipsterism, or did Eggers purposefully capture that flannel-and-beard ethos?

Maybe the only solution is to consider You Shall Know Our Velocity! on its own terms, and so far as that goes, it's an interesting enough story: After Will and Hand's friend Jack dies in a car accident, the two friends decide to spend a week flying around the world and giving away $32k (all that Will has left of an $80k windfall). Problems with weather and visas and flight schedules force them to scale back the scope of the trip (in the end they only make it to Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia) and giving away the money doesn't fulfill them as they had hoped. That's the book that the reviewers initially read, but the information that Hand later inserts throws the entire venture into a different light:  Hand states that they never had a friend named Jack, so of course, the foundational concept of the book -- a trip born of grief -- is a lie; while Will blames Hand for a severe beating he received from three men (that has lingering neurological and physical effects, not to mention the grotesqueness of his face that impacts how everyone they meet interacts with Will), the beating didn't happen; Will's mother, who he calls several times during the trip, had died years earlier; Will never had a brother, someone he refers to a few times; Will still has the remainder of the $80k to go home to, undermining the secondary conceit of the plot; and since Hand points out that a ghostwriter had added the first paragraph of the original edition, describing how Will and his mother died in a ferry accident, he casts doubt on the authorship of the entire book. The writing -- especially the conversations -- was clever and I was interested in the story…but this wasn't great until I started thinking about everything off the page; everything I've written about here. But, of course, what I'm thinking about is what Eggers wanted me to think about, so does that make it great?

In the end, I still don't know if this was art or just a guy with a bag on his head.

n  n

DNF. I just do not like this author's writing, at all. It's very juvenile, lots of grammatical errors and just really uninteresting. blah. Not for me.

Strange, fun, sad, compelling

If you’ve ever travelled free, with a backpack and not too many plans, this will often feel very familiar. The strangeness, the confusion, the emotion. It’s not often you feel totally rudderless and this book captures that compellingly. If you’ve loved and hated and lost friends forever, this will feel familiar. If you’re not sure why we are here and why you have so much more than many on the planet, this will feel familiar. If you’ve felt insane joy at losing yourself in an experience, this will feel familiar.

Highly recommend.

Really 2 1/2 stars

I'm not sure what to say about this book really. I didn't hate it, I didn't love it. I very often found myself enjoying Eggers's writing style while being annoyed with the story itself.

I don't really understand what it is with male writers that makes them want so badly to write these books about disillusioned young men who are basically losers. I mean this book is essentially Catcher in the Rye for people in their late 20s. I don't know I just have a problem with characters in books who are clearly losers and have clearly done nothing with their lives and then go about philosophizing about how life is meaningless and how there is so much pain and suffering blah blah blah.

I got the distinct feeling from this book that Jack was the only one who had made anything of himself. That Will and Hand are those friends you had in high school who will never move past their minimum wage jobs and will always be bitter about not reaching the potential they felt they were promised.

Remember those intoxicated days of the the early 2000's financial boom? Positive thinking? Anything was possible? There would always be more money round the corner? Somehow you'd always get by?

Or perhaps you weren't quite feeling it, and scoffed at this stuff like Billy Bragg dismissing a decade of glorious synthpop and silly clothes in one anti-Thatcher tirade. Though, on the basis of cosmic ordering infomercials featuring Noel Edmonds, and Kirsty and Phil's Pickfords porn, who could blame you?

You Shall Know Our Velocity isn't a tale of taking out a 120% mortgage to set up a personal shopping business with your very own branded Smart car, but it's nonetheless possessed by the spirit of that time, as Will and his mate Hand go on a short unplanned world tour to give away $40,000 he earned for unintentionally being featured in an advert.

Random nights out with insalubrious Russians, taping dollars to African donkeys, and other such madcap antics, interspersed with raw ponderings on the death of a friend and the aftermath of trauma almost can't help but sound when described in summary in 2012, like the InstaHipstaMatic polaroid cliche that launched a thousand blogs.

But actually, it's amazing because of the ten-years-ago-or-more unknowing innocence and because no-one can describe dark elated adventure quite like Eggers. There are good writers who can capture the feeling of a time and place in aspic. But Eggers does it in technicolour 3D hypervirtual reality and then adds a weird, yet brilliantly accurate metaphor that, as when the optician finds the perfect lens, makes you see it all differently again.

I will start this by saying "I love Dave Eggers." My next thought is that his editor(s) all too often don't do him any favors. This thought is not my own - the credit goes to my friend Joanna who said it first - but this 400 page novel should have been maybe 250 pages. I thought the same was true for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. With that said, there was a lot (too much!) that I loved about this novel. My real complaint about the novel is that there was too much of it.

I understand (from above friend Joanna) that YSKOV was originally a long story first published in the New Yorker. Joanna (and her sister) read it and thought it was "a heartbreaking work of staggering genius." The story was then (apparently) re-worked into a novel, in which form I read it. I have searched and searched for the New Yorker version and if anyone has it and wants to send it to me I'd LOVE to see it/read it. The novel was good; I'm lead to understand that the story was genius.

There were definitely moments of genius in the novel form. Coming from me this is a HUGE compliment; in fact it's just about the highest form of praise I can bestow on a writer: Eggers, for me, is a kind of modern Shakespeare. He has his finger so firmly on the pulse of humanity that sometimes I have to just stop reading and think and absorb the genius of it all.

The moment I knew that I loved William Shakespeare I was sitting in a very dark theater watching a local production of As You Like It during my freshman year of college. Orlando came on stage - loveless and alone in the forest - and he came upon all these love notes posted on the trunks of the surrounding trees. As he reads more and more of them he muses out loud: "Oh how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes." That moment was light a lightbulb for me. I was alone in a strange city and that sentiment rang so true. How could Shakespeare have understood that exact thought that I had almost 400 years before?

A similar moment happened for me in You Shall Know Our Velocity! when Hand and Will (narrator/main character) are in Marrakesh and Will breaks down in the street over the grief he feels for their mutual friend Jack, who died in a freak accident some 6 months prior. All of a sudden, quite out of the blue, the permanence of Jack's death hits Will squarely and he literally falls to the ground weeping. Will and Hand go on to talk about it, about their loss, about coming to terms with the reality of loss over the course of about 5 pages and those five pages were the best written testament to grief and loss that I can ever remember reading. Perhaps it is because I experienced a similar loss also about 6 months ago that this particular explication felt so "real" for me but I would put Eggers' writing about this subject up there with the best.

The novel is a "bildungsroman" in its purest, best form and if you're not in the mood to watch/understand as two young twenty-something Americans in the mid to late 90s come of age then you probably aren't going to come to appreciate this novel the way that I did. The main storyline is that Will and Hand, best friends in their twenties who are somewhat adrift decide to travel around the world with money that WIll has recently been given and give the money away. They have a week in which to do this because that is the amount of time that Hand can take off from work.

The premise is both preposterous and appealing - and one that you can readily ascribe to two young men in their twenties. It's neither fully fleshed out or logical but it is born from a need to DO something. Anything. It's almost cliche to say that Will and Hand are adrift, looking for meaning and purpose in their lives so recently scarred by the death of their third best friend, Jack. But it's exactly for this reason that the story works - because Will and Hand are both characters unto themselves and representatives of a greater segment of American society at large. They have grand ideas but no real means to implement them, although they bumble about and try. Even their names suggest the forces competing here. They have the *will* and want to *hand* out money to people .... but figuring out how to do that, without demeaning themselves or the people receiving their money turns out to be more complicated than they imagined. Such is life.

They concoct a plan to fly around the world as the world turns, staying just ahead of the revolving earth, thereby never really losing time. To Greenland! To Siberia! Mongolia! And then, suddenly, they realize they've forgotten about the International Date Line ... and while they think they're avoiding time, tricking it, actually once they cross the IDL now it's time playing a trick on them and they'll lose everything they've gained. Such is life.

Eggers has a wonderful way of writing to the heart of the matter and his language in that way reminds me of Hemingway - perhaps not because his language is so sparse and bare but there are moments of perception that just cut you dead with their simplicity, like a flashlight suddenly shone into a dark corner. Language and wordiness are not where Eggers' editor(s) fail him; what Eggers could use is someone to rein in his storytelling just a bit. When Will and Hand fail to make it out of Chicago en route to Greenland Eggers could have left well enough alone. But because one misstep was funny and enlightening he thought perhaps two would drive the point home further. The same for their day in Senegal. In a book about traveling the world only to come home again one incident in Senegal was enough - 75 pages devoted to the misadventures there over the course of one day (and multiple trips to the airport) begs for more editorial powers.

Like any good travel narrative, going around the world and meeting up with peoples and cultures not your own often teaches you more about yourself than about the places you are traveling to. So it was in You Shall Know Our Velocity!.

3.75 stars

Dave Eggers writes beautifully, yet his novel never seems to inspire any connection between the reader and the characters. The plot line seemed familiar, two young men, without plans traveling the world. The impetus for the trip seems to be the death of a childhood friend. The two remaining friends, the main Character who hasn't done much with his life and Hand, a good looking, risk taking, non motivated individual decide to give away a large sum of cash that the main character has acquired. They choose to do this overseas without any set goal or plans. Of course, interesting situations arise and the book keeps the reader entertained. However, through out the book, one wonders, what is the point? Why should I care? Neither of the places visited or the people met or the characters makes the reader care too much about any of it. It isn't a horrible book, it is readable, but does not leave one feeling as if they have learned anything worth while.

حالا می بینید چه سرعتی داریم نوشته دیوید اگرز نویسنده آمریکایی ، همان برداشت کلاسیک از زندگی جوانان به سبک آمریکایی را نشان می دهد ، جوانانی که با زندگی کردن در لحظه و لذت بردن از آن گرچه بسیار هم سریع بوده باشد ، تلاش دارند که کودکی خود را که شاید سخت بوده فراموش کنند .
قهرمانان کتاب او ، نوعی سخاوت عجیب و نامتعارف ، یعنی پخش پول ، دلار با ارزش آمریکایی در کشورهای فقیری مانند سنگال ، مراکش و یا مکزیک هم داشته اند که داستان اگرز را شعاری تر و کلیشه ای تر کرده . این رویکرد، مشکلات پیچیده کشورهای در حال توسعه را به ساده‌ترین شکل ممکن، یعنی کمبود پول، تقلیل می‌دهد. پخش پول، به عنوان راه‌حلی ساده و سریع برای تمام مشکلات این کشورها ارائه می‌شود که این امر، بسیار کلیشه‌ای و ساده‌انگارانه است ، گرچه که چهره ای خوب و ساده دل از آمریکاییان نشان می دهد .
تنها دلیلم برای خرید این کتاب، قیمت پایین آن بود که البته با چاپ جدید و قیمت نجومی‌اش، آن هم دیگر قابل توجیه نیست.