I loved reading this book again. I didn't mind the 100 pages that I found so unnecessary the first time. I love that it is a big, messy story with tangents and blocked paths and short cuts. He lays it all out there and is grand and humble all at once.
The early parts where he talks about his mother's last weeks are sad but somewhat restrained. I think the most powerful point in the whole book comes late when he describes his mother's funeral, what he had imagined it would be like--a fantasy sequence with the roof of the church lifting off and hundreds of people crowding, surrounding the church, her face shining down on them all from the sky. Then he snaps back to reality and tells us what it really was. Where were those hundreds of people? Why didn't the roof fly off? Why was it so normal and regular and real?
This beautiful book gave permission for a new kind of writer, a new kind of memoir. And most of them are vainly aiming for the height it attained.
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2 comments:
I have a little more negative view of your final thought.
The vast majority of Egger's followers have completely missed the point of ASWOSG and used it for permission to assail us with so much self involved claptrap.
(No really Don, tell us how you feel.)
I said "vainly aiming," Don. I agree with you.
But, boy, that Jonathan Safran Foer comes close.
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