Ebook How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields
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How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields
Ebook How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields
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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 Pensées 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 raft, 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."
A captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original way of thinking about the essential acts of reading and writing.
- Sales Rank: #651372 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-02-05
- Released on: 2013-02-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Guest Review of “How Literature Saved My Life,” by David Shields
By Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the best-selling memoir Wild. Strayed writes the “Dear Sugar” column on TheRumpus.net. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Self, the Missouri Review, Brain, Child, The Rumpus, the Sun and elsewhere. The winner of a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, her essays and stories have been published in The Best American Essays, The Best New American Voices, and other anthologies.
Great books are born of grand passions. The best literature is made when authors refuse to rest easy, but instead dig into their obsessions in order to express not just what’s true, but what’s truer still. This greatness is apparent on every page of David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life, a culturally searching declaration of the power and limitations of literature that’s also a highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal soul search by one super smart man who consumes and considers books as if his life depends on it.
Part memoir, part manifesto, How Literature Saved My Life is as wide-ranging as it is intimate, and much of its power lies in the ambitiousness of Shields’s reach. It’s a book that defies definition. My category for it is simply a strange book that I love. It’s a serenade wrapped inside a cross-examination; an intellectual book that reads like a detective novel. In its pages, one reads about subjects as diverse as Tiger Woods, the theory that someday tiny robots will roam inside our bodies to reverse the damage caused by aging, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and the private journals of Shields’s unsuspecting college girlfriend.
This is a long way of saying that How Literature Saved My Life is a book with balls. It doesn’t ask for permission to be what it is: an original, opinionated, gentle-hearted, astonishingly intelligent collage of the ideas, reflections, memories, and experiences of a writer so avidly determined to understand what literature means that the reader must know too.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2013: Anyone who gives a hoot about the status and the future of storytelling needs this rangy, brainy, bad-ass book--a book that celebrates books, dissects books, and pays homage to the creators of our stories. Packed with riffs and rants--some hilarious, some brilliant, some flat-out zany--this is caffeinated, mad-genius stuff: sly, manic, thoughtful, and witty. (Shields' three-page self-comparison to George W. Bush--"he likes to watch football and eat pretzels"--is especially fun.) At times, I felt like I was on a madcap tour of an eccentric professor's private basement library, never knowing what was around the next corner. My review copy is littered with underlines and exclamation points and, yes, a handful of WTFs. Part critical analysis, part essay, and part memoir, How Literature Saved My Life offers its liveliest passages when Shields reveals Shields. A stutterer, he developed an early kinship with the written word, since the spoken word came to him with "dehumanizing" difficulty. Which makes one of his final lines all the more potent: "Language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn't, not quite." --Neal Thompson
From Booklist
As the title suggests, the ever-goading, line-crossing Shields, riding high on the hubbub over his call for appropriation in Reality Hunger (2010), offers another mash-up of memoir and literary criticism. Though he veers off into annoying sexual braggadocio, he does offer telling glimpses into formative aspects of his life, such as his preference as a boy for watching rather than playing baseball, and why, for him, writing is “bound up” with stuttering. He critiques movies and television and muses on why we were gleeful over Tiger Woods’ fall, an inquiry that deepens into an energetic analysis of our “tragic flaw,” our impulse to self-destruct. Shields reiterates his call for nonfiction “that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world” and analyzes an array of writers, including Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Renata Adler, and Annie Dillard. Praising books that are “candid beyond candid,” he presents an intriguing annotated roll call of “fifty-five works I swear by.” Shields is an invaluable mind-sharpener; as you read, you argue with him, thus affirming the passion literature arouses and sustains. --Donna Seaman
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Stays with you
By Amazon Customer
While I disagreed with much of what Shields writes in this book, I found it thought-provoking, and it affected me for some time after I read it.
Shields quotes from a variety of writers and weaves in stories from his life (which I found evocative) to show how literature can and can't stave off despair. The book is weakest when Shields seems to assume the reader shares his reactions and his sense of despair, and strongest when Shields makes a personal argument for the kind of writing he finds meaningful. For example, a chapter called "Fifty-five Works I Swear By" got me excited about reading quite a few of the works, whereas a chapter that begins with Tiger Woods' car accident ("my initial reaction...was 'What's the matter with me that I hope he's been paralyzed or killed,'") led to some questionable Freudian business about "what lives wants to die again."
Shields believes the narrative novel no longer has anything to offer. Many readers are unlikely to agree with that. Yet Shields' argument for the kind of writing he feels is important is a fascinating read that makes you think critically about writing.
35 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
For lovers of words for dreamers,for realists and yes even idealists!
By bas bleu
I love hearing another word lovers thoughts and what they love, think and feel about words that have touched their lives, for me the author feels like and old friend, even though this is the first work of his that I have read. He gets it, all the wonderful,crazy, funny, absurd, thought provoking, endearing moments that words can bring to our experience on this journey, most importantly, he tells the truth about the hole in our lives that even really good writing cannot fill, for any of us. Why the hole? Because we are all mere mortals and perfection is not within our grasp, but learning is and that makes the journey well worth the taking. Love words, love to roll them through your mind ,fusing different thoughts in an out of the box way. Love to read authors that can mold nouns into a new way of seeing because of great choices of adjectives, or ideas drawn from the absurdity of life, love reading Aeschylus,Aristophanes,Cervantes, Milton, Goethe,Tolstoy, and more,more,more? Love different opinions and ideas-- viewpoints ,limitless suggestions and observartions in and about life, how to live it , how to perceive it, how to describe it, how to interpret it? In the end we have the scope of our experiences and what we read of others experiences, what a wonderful journey. Words are gems , the best writers are gem cutters of excellent talent, and add beauty, freshness, setting the gems they have cut,expanding our visions with the clarity of an idea to ponder and examine the beauty of a thought we had not had before. Words are a gift, a tool always changing,becoming,inspiring,provking thoughts,ideas and helping us become, if we but take the time to explore all different kinds of stories and yes even a childs book can be a true gem. If you are a lover of a good phrase, an apt description, unforgetable quotes,discovering an idea that you had never thought of, the good and the bad because they round us out and give birth to exploration of ourselves and our environments- chances are this book will inspire, entertain, and give the gift of making your mind a wiser place. Learning is supurb ecstacy.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful Thoughts, But Doesn't Add Up To A Powerful Message
By Benny Profane
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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