Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

by Geoff Dyer

Overview

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

"In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

Geoff Dyer was a talented young writer, full of energy and reverence for the craft, and determined to write a study of D. H. Lawrence. But he was also thinking about a novel, and about leaving Paris, and maybe moving in with his girlfriend in Rome, or perhaps traveling around for a while. Out of Sheer Rage is Dyer's account of his struggle to write the Lawrence book—a portrait of a man tormented, exhilarated, and exhausted. Dyer travels all over the world, grappling not only with his fascinating subject but with all the glorious distractions and needling anxieties that define the life of a writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312429461
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/10/2009
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including The Last Days of Roger Federer, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Zona, See/Saw, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

Editorial Reviews

The funniest book I have ever read.” —Steve Martin

“Painfully funny . . . sheer pleasure.” —David Lodge, The Times (London)

“An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Marvelous . . . a glorious truant from study . . . gives a better picture of Lawrence than any biography I know.” —James Wood, The Guardian (UK)

“Funny and self-laceratingly candid but with a nice Nabokovian spin on the fatal and irresistable allure of procrastination.” —William Boyd, Books of the Year, The Spectator (UK)

“Dizzying fun . . . Dyer is several kinds of good writer.” —David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

“The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious!” —John Berger

From the Publisher

Dyer writes two books at once, his own life and a challenging life of D.H. Lawrence, in this unique performance. This wrestling match with Lawrence reveals the author and his subject as finely matched opponents who ultimately shake hands on the nature of life and art. Dyer's record of his time spent exhaustively studying Lawrence is both tormented and comic. He "rages" at his very goals and against the compulsion to write, while also tracing, intermittently, Lawrence's own life's itinerary. In a sense, the project is a doomed undertaking. For could there be any less auspicious literary pursuit than formalizing the process of going "from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of the to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either . . ."? Chagrined by his ambivalence, seduced by his indecisiveness, Dyer aspires to the "floaty indifference of contentment" and comes to prefer Lawrence's manuscripts to the final texts. He longs for freedom, yet his gateway into Lawrence comes in a moment of raging indolence. Convinced that Lawrence's "writing urges us back to the source," Dyer traces the other writer's footsteps. Taos and Oaxaca, Sardinia and Eastwood are important backdrops along the way. Such scenery lures Dyer into a dialogue with Lawrence's mentors and tormentors and into the heat and chill of the arguments they waged. Larkin, Brodsky, and Julian Barnes are poetic referees in the ring. The push-me-pull-me here of the text and the sub-text, of biography and autobiography, turns up the volume on this fascinating symbiosis, which casts a newlight on creativity and the importance of destiny.

Kirkus Reviews