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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Dave Eggers Edition: Paperback Published: 2001-02-13 ISBN: 0375725784 Number of pages: 496 Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering GeniusBook Review: starts off wonderful, ends up lost Summary: 3 StarsMy good friend highly recommended this book for me to read last summer, citing Dave Eggers as his hero, and so I eagerly picked this up and delved into a story of a great sibling relationship in the wake of a tragedy.
As a 21 year old college student about to graduate, you would think that I would be obssessed with this work, completely representing my generation. And indeed, it succeeded in that. The whole living situation in the Bay Area of California was awesome, and his whole mantra of being young and free in America was great too, and the book should have ended at that. I should warn you that this is a memoir, so his ego is immensely represented as him being basically a self-absorbed Berkeley young intellectual. I could ramble on and on about this book and why I wouldn't rate it higher, but I'll just get to the point.
The first half is simply enjoyable to read with the whole relationship with his brother, dealing with the loss of parents (whom he seemingly never cared for), and with his sister being driven in law school and eventually marrying. His emotions are presented well with his relationships in this memoir, and then suddenly, as if out of the blue, Toph (his brother) is never mentioned again. The second half of the book is about his magazine and this MTV interview that never seems to end. It was so boring and meaningless. I want to read about you and your brother and your lives, not about some stupid magazine and a pretentious MTV real world interview to nowhere.
Overall, I get what he's saying, and it is a good message. Namely, family comes first but it is great to be young and free in America in your 20's, of course if only brought up by wealthy suburban Chicago parents. About 90% of America can't afford to rent his house that he did in the Berkeley hills with views of SF bay and not a job in site. It is a good book and I enjoyed it, but the Pulitzer Prize? No way.
Summary of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering GeniusDave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:"). But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.) The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting. All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback for decades to come. The Vintage edition includes a new appendix by the author.
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