Synopses & Reviews
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD"In the spirit of Julian Barness Flauberts Parrot and Alain de Bottons How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyers Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
The New York TimesGeoff Dyer was a talented young writer, full of energy and reverence for the craft, and determined to write a study of D. H. Lawrence. But he was also thinking about a novel, and about leaving Paris, and maybe moving in with his girlfriend in Rome, or perhaps traveling around for a while. Out of Sheer Rage is Dyer's account of his struggle to write the Lawrence book--a portrait of a man tormented, exhilerated, and exhausted. Dyer travels all over the world, grappling not only with his fascinating subject but with all the glorious distractions and needling anxieties that define the life of a writer.
Review
"The funniest book I have ever read."--Steve Martin"Painfully funny . . . sheer pleasure."--David Lodge, The Times (London) "An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book."--The Sunday Times (London) "Marvelous . . . a glorious truant from study . . . gives a better picture of Lawrence than any biography I know."--James Wood, The Guardian (UK) "Funny and self-laceratingly candid but with a nice Nabokovian spin on the fatal and irresistable allure of procrastination."--William Boyd, Books of the Year, The Spectator (UK) "Dizzying fun . . . Dyer is several kinds of good writer."--David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious!"--John Berger
Review
"A potently distilled treatise on literature." --
The New Yorker"In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it to . . . a wild book." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
"His brand of imaginative criticism illuminates a direction where literary criticism might go. If only we could have more fresh, insightful, energetic works such as Dyer's." --Jenifer Berman, Bomb magazine
Synopsis
Geoff Dyer had always wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study." Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the act of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, "It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid-queer stuff-but not bad."
Synopsis
Geoff Dyer had always wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his “Lawrence book.” The problem was, he had no idea what his “Lawrence book” would be though he was determined to write a “sober academic study.” Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.
Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the act of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, “It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid—queer stuff—but not bad.”
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.