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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
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
