Monday, March 22, 2004
Bibliography
Here’s a little bit more about the first few of my book recommendations below:
The World According to Garp is a sprawling, Dickensian slice of contemporary life, written in the late 1970s but exploring themes of creativity, personal isolation, and sexual politics that feel just as relevant today. It’s a wildly funny and sometimes surreal book that at the same time manages to be deeply heartfelt; as with much of Irving’s writing, you’re sorry to leave the characters behind when your experience with the book has ended. Garp is just packed with memorable scenes, images, and dialogue, as well as a number of interesting stories within the story that showcase Irving’s versatility. It’s the finest book about writing ever written.
The Dissertation is a fantastically innovative novel in which the story of a fictional Latin American country (magical realist flourishes and all) is presented in the form of a graduate thesis and its elaborate accompanying footnotes. Besides providing Koster with the opportunity to lampoon arcane academic conventions, this device allows two scenes to unfold in perfect parallelism as, for instance, a brutal beating is described in the footnotes and an affair takes place in the main text. Beyond the masterful technique, however, Koster succeeds in inventing a narrator and an entire country so colorful and fully-imagined that one cannot help but wonder if they might in fact be real. A neglected (and now, I believe, sadly out of print) classic.
Here’s a little bit more about the first few of my book recommendations below:
The World According to Garp is a sprawling, Dickensian slice of contemporary life, written in the late 1970s but exploring themes of creativity, personal isolation, and sexual politics that feel just as relevant today. It’s a wildly funny and sometimes surreal book that at the same time manages to be deeply heartfelt; as with much of Irving’s writing, you’re sorry to leave the characters behind when your experience with the book has ended. Garp is just packed with memorable scenes, images, and dialogue, as well as a number of interesting stories within the story that showcase Irving’s versatility. It’s the finest book about writing ever written.
The Dissertation is a fantastically innovative novel in which the story of a fictional Latin American country (magical realist flourishes and all) is presented in the form of a graduate thesis and its elaborate accompanying footnotes. Besides providing Koster with the opportunity to lampoon arcane academic conventions, this device allows two scenes to unfold in perfect parallelism as, for instance, a brutal beating is described in the footnotes and an affair takes place in the main text. Beyond the masterful technique, however, Koster succeeds in inventing a narrator and an entire country so colorful and fully-imagined that one cannot help but wonder if they might in fact be real. A neglected (and now, I believe, sadly out of print) classic.
