There's something a little frustrating about Dave Eggers. I genuinely think that he is a wonderful, gifted writer. He captures certain moments so completely and beautifully that I'm astounded past the point of envy. But he doesn't know when to quit. This is a fault I'm finding in a lot of contemporary writers like Michael Chabon and David Foster Wallace; as gifted as they are, they seem to lose their focus in the enjoyment of hearing/reading themselves. Wallace is particularly bad at this (I don't care how many people loved, luffed, lurved Infinite Jest, that book and all its gratuitous endnotes makes me want to dent my desk with my forehead). There were some genuinely lovely parts of this book that make we waffle over the star rating--I really wanted to like Velocity--but overall I'm left pretty ambivalent.

The thing I remember most strongly about this book is just toodling along, minding my own business, and then boom! pow! meta! mmmmmmmetametametameta! META!. Did Dave Eggers invent meta? For me, he invented meta. And no one, before or after or since or whenever, will come close to giving me that gasping shocked awe. Fuck off, haters; I love him so so so.

Basically one of the most idealistic modern fairy tales I’ve read. Eggers is definitely a talented writer as I just could not stop reading. The book is not without it’s flaws, though. Eggers’ wide eyed naïve view of the world is seldom shaken, and save for Will’s self effacing monologues the story exists without any real conflict. Yeah, okay, Will is internally conflicted but it just wasn’t enough for me. And the main characters, though great to read about, are still the only real voices throughout the novel…and Hand gets really annoying after the first hundred pages or so. Still, this is a fantastic read and definitely worth your time.

I got this for some light reading with a two day bus and plane trip in front of me. At first the premise of this book turned me off a little, and I felt like I was reading some literary-hipster's boring fantasy. By the end of the book, however, I had laughed enough to make me recomend this to anyone. I really liked the passage where you find out what the title means. The quirky relationship of the two main characters, the fact that Will always calls his mom, and the ending really got to me in the end. The Kurt Vonnegut-esque pictograms spiced within and uncoventional/creative typographical choices also impressed me.

I have a visceral aversion to Dave Eggers for a variety of reasons, many of which aren't particularly rational. He isn't really any more twee than, say, Jonathan Safran Foer, and I like Foer. (With a certain amount of self-hating non-hipster* guilt, naturally.)

Dave Eggers, though, is a little too obsessed with his own cleverness, and doesn't disguise it as well as many writers do. The first part of this book was twee beyond words - a journey! with two best friends! one of whom has a strange sexual fetish! and they have all this money and have to dispense it to deserving foreigners! The starving African motif was especially irritating. It was also excessively self-aware. The second part was the only saving grace -- beyond the mechanics of "good writing" -- wherein the friend of the first section's narrator enters into the manuscript and says, "Look, readers, about 65% of what you just read is straight up twee bullshit, and here's why."

I think my biggest problem is that I hated it while at the same time relating to it, which only served to make me hate it more. It's a little Catcher in the Rye for the late-twenties set, and I hated Catcher in the Rye, too. I'm not going to recommend it to anyone, but if you want to read it I won't try to dissuade you. It's not bad. It's just profoundly irritating.


*Seriously, fuck you, I'm not a hipster.

P.U.

This is a book about nothing with characters who are unrealistically stupid but it did have some emotional parts that were fine.

So I finished this book and I was underwhelmed, which I wasn’t expecting since this is the fourth Dave Eggers book I’ve read and I really like him as an author. Then I started reading the reviews and realized I have the edition without Hand’s afterward and I am so sad and I have changed my mind (if anyone knows where to find a pdf of just that section, lmk). So now how I’m interpreting this is that Will and Hand are the same person, but Will is the mind and Hand is the body, and the main character is on a solo trip across the world and is dealing with the relationship between his thoughts and his actions. This explains why Will always cringes inwardly about the things Hand does and contemplates leaving him but never does. It’s like cringing at your own actions, and wanting to separate yourself from them but you can’t. This interpretation also changes how I view the complete dumbass things they do in this book (ie jumping between trees 18ft in the air, jumping into the donkey cart, etc.). While reading the book and considering Will and Hand as two separate entities I thought they were so dumb for egging each other on, but when I think about it as if they are the mind and the body, it actually makes sense. So now I am realizing that once again Dave Eggers delivers

I disliked the main characters too much to ever really get into this. I read about them being doofuses for a whole lot of pages and neither I nor they seemed to learn much from the experience. Why did this happen.

Amazing writing, warm nostalgia.

Eggers' writing is excellent - he continually surprises you with his diction, observations and turn of phrase. However, this is not enough to carry the book. It is postmodern in form and watches the main character proceed with little sense of destination. Surely that is the point, but it leaves the plot lacking. I made it through only out of appreciation for the language and images, but by the end even this had run dry. If you appreciate witty and crafty language, take a look; there is plenty of content to consider and recall afterwards, and the characters and events have meaning and potency. But don't expect it to be a book you can't put down. In the end, one finishes by force of will, but one feels that a story should proceed by other means.

Entre el principio de este libro (texto que originalmente era la propia portada):
"Todo lo que se narra aquí ocurre después de la muerte de Jack y antes de que mi madre y yo nos ahogáramos en el incendio de un ferry en el río Guaviare, frío y teñido de taninas, al este del centro de Colombia, con otros cuarenta y dos lugareños a los que ni siquiera habíamos llegado a conocer".
y el final:
"Todo se paró durante un minuto lo juro, pero entonces el sonido y las imágenes volvieron y durante dos meses más, gloriosos e interminables, vivimos".
transcurre el relato del viaje alrededor del mundo durante una semana que Will y Hand emprenden con el objetivo de gastar los 38 000 dólares que Will recibió por el uso de su silueta en una campaña publicitaria. Un viaje en que que Will quiere librarse del dinero, de la muerte de su amigo Jack y de los recuerdos que lo asaltan cada noche y le impiden dormir, mientras que Hand quiere divertirse, conocer lugares nuevos y ayudar a la gente local. Una empresa esta última que resultará mucho más dura de lo que ambos habían imaginado.

El estilo narrativo es fundamentalmente el diálogo alternado con monólogos interiores de Will, que es quien narra una historia que resulta divertida, confrontante y conmovedora aunque también confusa: ¿son Will y Hand dos jóvenes hedonistas sin sentido alguno de la responsabilidad, o corren por el mundo porque quedarse quietos en este momento de su vida simplemente no es una opción? El libro no aporta respuestas a estas preguntas, si es que tales respuestas existen las tendrá que encontrar el lector dentro de su propia experiencia y de su propia conciencia.

Dave Eggers es el último intelectual comprometido de nuestra época. Pero no solo aborda sus obras con valentía y honestidad desde un auténtico compromiso moral y social, además lo hace con un talento narrativo de gran altura que hace que sus libros realmente funcionen como obra literaria. Eggers es famoso por su biografía, por su revista, por sus acciones y por sus declaraciones. Ya va siendo hora de que se haga también famoso por los libros que escribe.