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Reality Hunger Review @ B&N Review
Right here.
I liked it, quite a bit. I know a lot of you didn’t, and some of you have very good reasons for not liking it, though I’m not exactly getting the people who say this is a book against literature.
But anyway if you’d like to share your agreement, disagreement, whatever, my comments forum is your comments forum. Just please, nothing that will make me sigh and stare down into the keyboard while shaking my head.
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Scott, I liked the review and agree that RH is is artful and provocative. Shields has great taste, both in the quotes he appropriates and the books he recommends in the text.
I still don’t understand all the territorial pissing about fiction vs. nonfiction. At its most profound RH seemed to argue for genre-defying, novel works of art that occupy the mythical space of “this did and did not happen.” Shields is right that the most exciting work is being done in the borderlands; the best novels seem real, while the best nonfiction “reads like a novel.”
Given that he recognizes the hybrid nature of both books and our so-called reality, I don’t see how Shields can spend so much time battling his vaguely defined “literary novel.” It seems that Shields pretends to be against genre, but actually needs genre for his aesthetics to work. To me this was a near-great book that devolves into a petty MFA turf war.
Eric: That’s a fair criticism. The book’s a manifesto, so I’m okay with it being more concerned with defining what it’s for than what it’s against, but I’ll agree that this has led to problems with people not being clear on the kind of book Shields doesn’t like. (And in this, the post-publication interviews have been helpful.) You can see this issue in the Zadie Smith response, where she’s trying to defend the literature that Shields is ostensibly against, but it’s not entirely clear that she knows just what it is that Shields is against.
Scott, thanks. I’ll check out those interviews. I assumed Shields was against the “realist” novel that lazily and unselfconsciously adopts exhausted 19th-century methods for depicting the real. In which case I’m with him 100%. I think the depiction of the real is only one of many projects fiction has, though, and personally I take a lot of pleasure in highly artificial projects (Nabokov and Hitchcock, for example, where the master’s hand is everywhere and characters/actors are brazenly treated like cattle). I wonder if Shields is really about mimesis in the end.