How Literature Saved My Life (Audible Audio Edition) David Shields Seth Michael Donsky Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : How Literature Saved My Life (Audible Audio Edition) David Shields Seth Michael Donsky Audible Studios Books
In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, and painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature.
Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal's Penses to Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Renata Adler's Speedboat to Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past) to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his "ridiculous" ambivalence), his character flaws, his woes, his serious despairs.
Books are his life, but when they come to feel unlifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness and self-consciousness - perfect, since so much of what ails him is acute self-consciousness. And he shares with us a final irony he wants "literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this - which is what makes it essential.
How Literature Saved My Life (Audible Audio Edition) David Shields Seth Michael Donsky Audible Studios Books
Before picking up this book I was familiar with David Shields, having read "Black Planet," "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You Will Be Dead," and "Reality Hunger" and a few other of his essays. Shields is both brutally honest emotionally and intellectually super-powered; for instance in "Black Planet" he combines a racial study of the NBA along with personal revelations that he imagines that he is as "long and lean" as Gary Payton while having sex with his wife.In "How Literature Saved My Life" Shields misses his mark. Ostensibly this is a work about - like the title says - how literature saved his life. However, literature really didn't save his life. Like many reviewers, I thought I was headed for a work on the loneliness and alienation of modern society and the redemptive powers of literature. Shields hints at this, but most of this work is about the literature he likes and how most of literature fails him. In fact, he hasn't read much literature since the late 1990's (pg 124). What Shields has been more focused on is the pursuit of a new literary form, one he calls collage, that would exist on the "bleeding edge" of genres between fiction and non-fiction and memoir and essay. These are the books that Shields writes about, the ones he loves, the one he quotes from and recommends. That's a big part of this book - as well as much of this book is an argument why he published "Reality Hunger" which was pretty tiresome since it is not that interesting and not that easy to relate to.
Still, Shields' voice is powerful enough that it kept me intrigued the entire time, and I'm sure this will be a book I reread passages of continually. Shields will deconstruct himself, including the less pleasant parts of himself, with exacting laser vision and leave himself bare to the reader. He has a similar ability to render an entire novel to a single powerful sentence - so much so that even though I have read some of these works I'm left saying "wait that's the point of ___?" I also found it interesting when Shields says that the novel was created to "access interiority" (pg 129) but that social media is catching up and surpassing the novel in this regard.
The sparse nature of the book leaves the short memoir passages that much more powerful. In particular, the essay regarding Tiger Woods and how our strengths and weaknesses are indivisible from one another is particularly fantastic. Shields assembles a murderer's row of thinkers and writers to back his argument. Nabokov, Tolstoy, Pynchon, DF Wallace...quotations by all these writers are here in stripped form, rippling with intellectual power. I was a little surprised with how often the ghost of David Foster Wallace floated across the pages of this manuscript. But since Wallace was primarily concerned with literature as a salve for loneliness, Shields finds much common ground with him, though Shields apparently has no time for Wallace's novels finding that "...the game is not worth the candle." (pg 192). Wait, what? Your time is that valuable?
That's one of the reasons it is so tough for Shields to be representative for all readers when he's quite clearly allergic to plot or any literary devices at all. Shields believes that we are all terminal patients, so writers should just get to the point already. He doesn't want anything between him and the artist - just the artist on an autopsy table, laid bare for Shields to examine. He wants to know the secret of "...how the writer solves being alive."
I agree with Shields on a lot of points; hell, which one of us doesn't want to know how to live? That's what Franzen, an author Shields derided in "Reality Hunger," was examining in his latest book. As Shields tells us, writing should be the "axe to break the frozen sea within us" (Kafka), or the "bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness" (Wallace). At this, Shields only succeeds at moments, glancingly. I don't agree with his argument, and he talks about himself very little. Since most of this book is a a personal literary argument rather than personal memoir, I'm left with not much to connect to. So no matter how strongly he makes his case for collage and for the hollowness of the novel, I can't seem to meet him out on this abyss spanning bridge.
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How Literature Saved My Life (Audible Audio Edition) David Shields Seth Michael Donsky Audible Studios Books Reviews
Didn't enjoy the writing.
Hard to imagine how Shields pulled off this neat trick a discussion that is both dispassionate and heartfelt. This lyric on the relationship of writer/reader to writing, the indispensable (oxygen-dispensing) role literature plays in the life of the mind and the heart, is oddly enchanting and consoling. Shields has a way of situating (and playing) the Self in an age of disintegration that allows the reader to navigate not only the writing (both that of Shields and of the pieces under discussion), but also to meditate on, gain enlightenment on, the perilous integration of his/her own Self. (People tend to confuse the "Shields" depicted in these pages with the writer himself...really, the "I" talking to us, Shields's Shields, is all of us, in one way or another.) Ultimately, the book is a paean to the beautifully written word and the consolations it affords, a depiction of the 21st-century soul struggling for sanity and sound footing in an age with precious little of either...and a good atlas to boot.
Shields says there's no more time in this world for long form fiction. Self reflexive memoir is all that's worth a damn. Concision is paramount .The words that take the reader from here to there are a waste of time. You better be confronting grief, or something seemingly trivial but actually profound, or wrestling with your relationship with you dad, or all of the above--cuz the novel is dead. Disjointed, patchwork, collage is best and that's how How Lit Saved My Life is written. He's honest and erudite and highly quotable of quotables. I underlined a lot. I'm happy I read it but am left feeling a little hostile towards his point of view. I had wanted to tear into the agenda he's trying to put over but maybe I need to meditate on why I feel so threatened instead. I just know I'm not ready to declare fiction slayed and Twitter/Youtube triumphant.
I found David Shields take on life, his irreverence as well as his generosity toward those whom he admires, both interesting and refreshing. I not only ordered his memoir after reading this book, but also other books that he recommends in this volume, somehow trusting him enough by dint of his writing to trust his taste in other writers. I know he is right about Renata Adler, so at least I'm safe there. Oh, and Phillip Lopate recommends him, and I trust Phillip's judgment.
=Sheri Nelson Maclean
The only reason I am giving 4 stars instead of 5 is that many of the discussions were too short. But this is a wonderful analysis of how the books discussed affected Shields. The discussion is so good, the only fault I can find is when he just lists books rather than discussing them, or when he just gives a one sentence review that doesn't tell you very mych. I got many suggestions here for new books to get. Finally, in this electronic age, always good to see someone praise the virtues of reading.
Before picking up this book I was familiar with David Shields, having read "Black Planet," "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You Will Be Dead," and "Reality Hunger" and a few other of his essays. Shields is both brutally honest emotionally and intellectually super-powered; for instance in "Black Planet" he combines a racial study of the NBA along with personal revelations that he imagines that he is as "long and lean" as Gary Payton while having sex with his wife.
In "How Literature Saved My Life" Shields misses his mark. Ostensibly this is a work about - like the title says - how literature saved his life. However, literature really didn't save his life. Like many reviewers, I thought I was headed for a work on the loneliness and alienation of modern society and the redemptive powers of literature. Shields hints at this, but most of this work is about the literature he likes and how most of literature fails him. In fact, he hasn't read much literature since the late 1990's (pg 124). What Shields has been more focused on is the pursuit of a new literary form, one he calls collage, that would exist on the "bleeding edge" of genres between fiction and non-fiction and memoir and essay. These are the books that Shields writes about, the ones he loves, the one he quotes from and recommends. That's a big part of this book - as well as much of this book is an argument why he published "Reality Hunger" which was pretty tiresome since it is not that interesting and not that easy to relate to.
Still, Shields' voice is powerful enough that it kept me intrigued the entire time, and I'm sure this will be a book I reread passages of continually. Shields will deconstruct himself, including the less pleasant parts of himself, with exacting laser vision and leave himself bare to the reader. He has a similar ability to render an entire novel to a single powerful sentence - so much so that even though I have read some of these works I'm left saying "wait that's the point of ___?" I also found it interesting when Shields says that the novel was created to "access interiority" (pg 129) but that social media is catching up and surpassing the novel in this regard.
The sparse nature of the book leaves the short memoir passages that much more powerful. In particular, the essay regarding Tiger Woods and how our strengths and weaknesses are indivisible from one another is particularly fantastic. Shields assembles a murderer's row of thinkers and writers to back his argument. Nabokov, Tolstoy, Pynchon, DF Wallace...quotations by all these writers are here in stripped form, rippling with intellectual power. I was a little surprised with how often the ghost of David Foster Wallace floated across the pages of this manuscript. But since Wallace was primarily concerned with literature as a salve for loneliness, Shields finds much common ground with him, though Shields apparently has no time for Wallace's novels finding that "...the game is not worth the candle." (pg 192). Wait, what? Your time is that valuable?
That's one of the reasons it is so tough for Shields to be representative for all readers when he's quite clearly allergic to plot or any literary devices at all. Shields believes that we are all terminal patients, so writers should just get to the point already. He doesn't want anything between him and the artist - just the artist on an autopsy table, laid bare for Shields to examine. He wants to know the secret of "...how the writer solves being alive."
I agree with Shields on a lot of points; hell, which one of us doesn't want to know how to live? That's what Franzen, an author Shields derided in "Reality Hunger," was examining in his latest book. As Shields tells us, writing should be the "axe to break the frozen sea within us" (Kafka), or the "bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness" (Wallace). At this, Shields only succeeds at moments, glancingly. I don't agree with his argument, and he talks about himself very little. Since most of this book is a a personal literary argument rather than personal memoir, I'm left with not much to connect to. So no matter how strongly he makes his case for collage and for the hollowness of the novel, I can't seem to meet him out on this abyss spanning bridge.
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